Philosophy in Practice by Adam Morton

Second Edition - Adam Morton

Teacher's Guide - Planning Your Course

The most basic decision is how much you are going to cover. You can revise your plan later, as you discover how much material your class can absorb in a week without becoming bored or overwhelmed. But you do need a plan to start with. For a one- semester introductory course I would expect to cover essential sections of Parts I and II and a few topics from Part III. For a two-semester course I would work through the whole book. So in the one- semester case you have to decide which topics from Part III to include and whether you should skip topics from Parts I and II to make room for them. In fact, you have three crucial decisions to make.

What role is PHILOSOPHY IN PRACTICE going to play in your course? It could be the center of the course, the source of all the week-by-week reading, and the content of most classes. Or it could be augmented by other books. The most likely addition is some philosophical classics. Parts I and II are designed to go well with readings from Plato, Descartes, and Hume. (See the references to Plato in chapters 1 and 4, to Descartes in chapter 3, and to Hume in chapters 5 and 6 to see which selections from these authors would make the closest connections.) There are also discussions of Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Mill, and Kant. So readings from some anthology such as John Cottingham's Western Philosophy: An Anthology (Blackwell, 1996) could easily accompany the book. In the "further reading" list for each chapter I have listed passages that are included in Cottingham's collection. I don't think it would work to make the course center on some other textbook and then to use PHILOSOPHY IN PRACTICE as a source of occasional activities. The transition from lecture and lecture-discussion to activity-centered teaching would be too abrupt.

How quickly will the course gather momentum? I have designed Part I to allow a very gentle start, if wanted, so that the general idea of philosophical enquiry can sink in very slowly. The practical form of the question is: how long will you spend on chapter 1? With relatively sophisticated students you could cover chapter 1 in a week - two or three class meetings - referring explicitly only to the core sections. (The planning information for the chapter specifies the core.) That would help clear time for doing more things later. On the other hand, if you want to gauge the class's ability more cautiously and to practice teaching techniques with them you could take two weeks, and cover most of the sections. Whichever your approach, it is worth thinking through what parts of chapter 3 you will cover while planning chapter 1. There is some overlap in content between 1 and 3, with the vital difference that chapter 2, on logical argument, comes between them and is presupposed in 3, and that 3 has a specific focus on Cartesian rather than Socratic skepticism.

What topics from Part III will be included? Part III includes discussions of materialism and the mind-body problem, social contract theories of ethics, religious versus secular bases for morality, primary and secondary qualities, free will, personal identity, verificationism, and scientific realism. You won't want to cover more than a few of these, but some may be on the list of topics that you would like to include. And my experience is that mind-body issues, and issues about the possibility of secular ethics, interest beginning students and make lively classes. So you may want to find a place for parts of chapters 12 and 13. Or alternatively, if your emphasis earlier has been on scientific method, doing chapter 10 intensively, you may want to complete the topic with a discussion of scientific realism from chapter 15. Here's a suggestion: let the class decide. Leave several weeks at the end of the course for doing topics from Part III, and then six weeks before the end of the semester ask the students to read the introduction and chapter objectives to chapters 12, 13, 14, 15. Then have a vote to choose two topics from the list above. If the two fall into the same chapter then cover all or most of the sections in that chapter, in order to bring out the links between them. For a radical version of this see the notes on my 2004 course, which are part of this teacher's guide.

Having made these choices, you now have to make a week-by-week plan of reading. This must be your plan. The planning information in the class-planning guide will tell you which are the essential sections in each chapter, and you must then choose additional sections according to what interests you - most of us teach best on topics that interest us - and what you think will engage your class. I would expect that in a 14-week semester the result might be something like one of the following (but don't automatically adopt this - think what the constraints on your course are and what you want to do):

Week 1: chapter 1
Weeks 2 and 3: chapter 2
Week 4: chapter 3
Week 5: chapter 4
Weeks 6 and 7: chapter 5
Week 8: chapter 6
Week 9: chapter 7 - vote on which Part III topics to cover
Week 10: chapter 8
Week 11: chapter 9
Week 12: Part III topic 1 or chapter 10
Week 13: Part III topic 2
Week 14: chapter 11

You will have to tell the class more than this, of course. They will need to know which sections of each chapter are to be read, and for which classes. And you will have to specify any additional readings, also week by week. I'd recommend deciding what variation on the plan above you will make, taking into account the exact number of weeks and classes you have, and then reading through the book together with the planning information in the "class-planning guide" in order to make this detailed plan.

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