PHIL102 Introduction to Philosophy II
Topic: Susan Wolf, “Meanings of Lives”
In this practicum, I gave a guest lecture in Christina’s PHIL102. I taught Susan Wolf’s paper “Meanings of Lives”. In particular, I taught Wolf’s distinction between the purpose of life and what makes lives meaningful, and the difference between objective and subject values.
Two general observations. First, it is a relatively quiet class. It isn’t a small class: there are almost 100 students, but very few of them talked.
For instance, when I asked them what would friends not do to one another (and I gave time to think about it), there was only one or two students hesitantly answered the question.
Second, Christina thinks that I explained quite clearly the difference between objective and subject value in relation to meanings of lives. This is good. I found it not easy to clearly explain it and I spent quite some time trying to figure out how to do it well.
Now, one thing that I am particularly concerned with in this lecture, and I asked Christina before the lecture for specific feedback on, is whether my lecture can help develop the students’ “disciplinary behaviour”. This isn’t easy. I take it that the disciplinary behaviour of philosophy is read, think, and write critically. These are all quite general skills and it seems hard to find specific ways to develop these skills.
Reading critically and arguing based on reason is certain key to the disciplinary behaviour of philosophy, so what I did this time was explaining the “argument strategy” that Wolf uses in the paper. I explained that Wolf tries to argue what a meaningful life is like by considering what a meaningless life is like. I explained her argument strategy by comparing it with friendship. If we want to know what a good friend is like, we can first consider what a bad friend is like. Knowing the latter can help us figure out the former.
By explaining Wolf’s argument strategy clearly, I hope to achieve two things. First, I demonstrate to the students how to analyse a paper and thereby how to read it critically. Second, I develop their argument skill. Not only do I analyse and explain Wolf’s argument strategy to the students, I also let them try to use it on their own: I asked them to use the strategy to figure what a good friend is like. So there were explication, demonstration, and application. I hope it was successful, and Christina seemed to think that it was helpful.
There was one idea that came out of our post-practicum meeting: reading exercise. Reading critically is a disciplinary behaviour of philosophy. And reading philosophy papers requires a level of close reading that is different from reading say political science or psychology papers. Students new to philosophy—or even those who have studied some philosophy—may not know or may not know how to do it. Perhaps I can consider how to incorporate reading exercises into my future teaching. The idea is to ask them a specific question about the text and then ask them to read a certain passage and find the answer. I will find it out in my next practicum, which will be a business ethics lecture.
