Teaching

Hi everyone.  I’m conducting an advanced undergraduate course on the morality of war next erm and would be very appreciative if anyone has any suggestions on which books or articles to assign.  Obviously, I know Walzer’s book is a classic, and there’s McMahan’s book Killing in War – but I’m not a specialist, so I could really use some help.  Many thanks in advance to everyone who posts a suggestion!

The 19th Century Philosophically is full of exciting developments that changed our world and that changed philosophy.  The problem that I’ve been having as I work to put together a syllabus for a seminar on it in the spring is that I am tired of a 19th Century course that either just shows the development of German Idealism or that is a hodgepodge of stuff from the aforesaid idealists, utilitarians, darwinians, pragmatists, and positivists (though I think the latter approach better represents the century).  I want to make my course both coherent and interesting, while being faithful to the diversity of approaches found in the anglo-american and european traditions during this time.  My solution follows.  I would love comments that would help me to flesh out this idea (maybe suggesting primary texts that I might use) or to firm the idea up a bit and to focus it. Basically, what I want to do is look at the relationship between scientific knowledge and political power in the 19th Century.  I am thinking of using Rabinow’s French Modern to give some context and to look particularly at theory of and for colonization.  In addition to this anchor text, I plan on looking at Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right, Bentham on laws, the panopticon and some of his plans for housing of the poor, Saint-Simon, Comte (of course), Marx and Engels, Mill on philosophy of science, and Herbert Spencer.  I would love some other figures to check out, especially women philosophers as this list is unfortunately bereft of them.  Will the idea fly?  Am I not really doing 19th Century Philosophy if I follow through with this plan?  Will I have harmed my students’ philosophical education if I don’t teach Hegel and Nietzsche?

Here are two questions that strike me as worth thinking about.

Say you wanted to teach a liberal arts-style freshman seminar that introduced students to the idea of reflecting on politics and society, but you didn’t want to turn it into yet another Applied Ethics or Introduction to Political Philosophy class that crammed in all the essential philosophical problems and texts: Capital Punishment, the Duty to Obey the Law, Abortion, Euthanasia, etc., on the one hand, and Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Mill, etc., on the other. Instead, you’d much rather just use plain old essays — well-crafted, accessible, insightful, evocative, memorable essays — written by people who may or may not be academics or part of the academic tradition.

The kind of essay I’m thinking of would be one that didn’t so much need to be explained as experienced, that presents a viewpoint that seizes your imagination in some way, rather than an argument or conceptual apparatus that needs to be taken apart, dusted a little by a qualified technician, and then put back together in sound working order. These would be essays that have a force that can’t really be conveyed to someone who has not read them, and that become part of the background framework of your way of thinking about the political and social world and the stuff in it that matters. They would ideally be long enough to be a substantial read, worth assigning as a text, but not too long to be a task that requires the threat of academic sanctions to be completed. Above all, they must not be difficult to read or boring to think about. They should be the sort of thing people mean when they talk about the art of the essay.

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Though I’m a political philosopher, Marxism/Socialism is not my area of expertise.  Still, I was surprised when, while teaching an essay by Kai Nielsen the other day, I discovered that I really don’t know what a means of production is supposed to be.

The claim that the means of production ought to be owned publicly, rather than privately, seems to be one of if not the defining characteristics of socialism.  So it seems pretty important to be clear on what it refers to.

On the most natural reading, a “means of production” would be anything that’s used to produce.  But that seems very, very broad.  Sure, factories are means of production, but so are muffin trays.  So is my brain, and my muscles.

Do socialists hold that even these things should be publicly owned?  Does it depend on how we use them?  Nielsen says that a socialist will allow for personal private property - and muffin trays seem about as personal as one could get.  Does this mean that we’re allowed to bake muffins for ourselves?  For our neighbors?  For our neighbors in exchange for wine?

How, in other words, does a socialist (Marxist or otherwise) demarcate legitimate personal property from means of production?  Or can the two be reconciled in a principled way?  If public ownership of the means of production can be reconciled with private personal property, can it also be reconciled with some notion of self-ownership?

Hi all,

I just joined Public Reason (having met Simon at a conference) and am looking forward to participating.  I’ve already seen lots of terrific material, and realize that I should have joined long ago.

I have what may seem a strange problem.  I’ll be teaching an undergraduate lecture course in Political Ethics next Spring quarter, as I have in the past.  This is a conceptual rather than a practical course, it covers not bribes and whistleblowing, but the basic theoretical works relevant to political ethics issues (though we will treat a few actual cases).  We’ll be reading Pitkin on representation, Machiavelli’s Prince, Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation”–and a bit of moral philosophy on an introductory level: utilitarianism, deontology, Bernard Williams on integrity and personal projects and shooting one to save ten, that sort of thing.  While the course is nominally upper level, there are no prerequisites (UCLA’s bureaucracy won’t allow it), and UCLA has no core requirements in moral and political philosophy such that I can count on students’ knowing some.   Nor is this a course for philosophy (or political theory) majors.  The students are political science or public policy majors interested in the substantive issues, not in ethical theory.

My problem is Kant.  When I’ve taught the course in the past, I’ve tried teaching Kant through the Grounding and a few of the writings on lying, but it hasn’t worked out.  The students find my lectures clear; they like Korsgaard on the right to lie; they get the murderer at the door stuff and enjoy debating it–but the Grounding is just over their head.  Spending two weeks on it (out of ten) doesn’t help: that’s of course not enough time, and it’s not the right students, and they’re just not able to take it in.  But I don’t really know how else to teach Kantianism.  “Theory and Practice” is lovely but deceptively allusive and not on the main topics of deontology; the same is true in spades of “Towards Perpetual Peace.”

I’d welcome any suggestions: an unknown piece of Kant (e.g. a public lecture) that I’m not familiar with?  (If it’s in German only and not too long, fine: I’ll happily translate for the class and with luck for publication in Teaching Ethics or something.)  A standard introductory piece on Kantianism, with a few key quotations and some down-to-earth yet serious explication?

In this I may be handicapped by never having taken an introductory ethics course myself.  I took a whole course on the First Critique and read lots of Kant’s (and others’) ethical works in advanced-undergraduate and graduate seminars, but never had to learn as an undergraduate what I’m now supposed to convey.  (The famous Justice class at Harvard doesn’t count: I’m looking to convey a bit more than is expected in that entertaining but not egregiously substantive course.)

To some extent, Mill’s Utilitarianism, while nowhere as baffling as Kant, is also hard to teach in such a context, and I’d welcome suggestions for substitutes or supplements to that too.

Many thanks in advance,

Andy.

Here’s a quick question I have about teaching jurisprudence. There’s an interesting literature on the nature of rights that will be familiar to many people, and I think it is a good thing for undergraduate jurisprudence students to be exposed to it. However, in addition to reading Hohfeld, Hart, Raz, and some others, one might wish that they had an easy way to apply the complexity of rights theory to their interpretations of the Bill of Rights (we’re talking about US students here), otherwise we lose a bit of traction with the kind of law that interests them most. As such, I want to start gathering suggestions for good readings on how papers such as “The Nature of Rights,” illuminate the constitutional right to free speech or the constitutional right to bear arms, etc. In short, what’s the best way to demonstrate to my students that wading through all that conceptual analysis can make a difference to how they think about their constitution? I’m sure there are some obvious readings, but I thought I would draw on the wisdom of those who have found particular papers fitting this bill useful and enjoyable to teach.

I am teaching Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil) for the first time this term, and I have run into some puzzles I am hoping some of the more experienced Nietzsche scholars on this list can help me work through. The points are two; these have come out in class discussions and I’ve been uncertain how to respond. I’ll put them as tendentiously, contentiously, and ignorantly as I can, and plan on backtracking as quickly as I can once knowledge is imposed upon me.

1. Nietzsche seems to suggest contradictory things as to what sort of social arrangements his view would prescribe (if it would prescribe anything; more on this next). On the one hand, he indicates that the oppression of the “free spirits” by the moral codes of the herd (”one long coercion”) are necessary for the development and fruition of the greatness of spirit and exfoliation of the will to power in those spirits. On the other hand, he also indicates that hierarchical societies — with abundant sacrifice of the lower forms of human life for the sake of the development of the higher forms — are a precondition for the highest development of the type “human being.” These seem like contradictory prescriptions. The best I can do with them is to think that his view is analogous to Marx’s on the communist revolution. The idea in that case is that capitalist societies overproduce to a point at which, after the revolution, the superabundance of material goods “launches” the new communist arrangements successfully. Here, the idea would be that the “long coercion” does likewise for the development of free spirits or “philosophers of tomorrow” — in effect the hierarchical societies would build on the obstructive “capital” of the long period of “rule of the rabble” under the usual run of moral codes. Beyond this, I am stuck.

2. I wonder what prescriptive force the view has for individuals at all. Suppose, on the one hand, you are (or take yourself to be) one of the free spirits. Then what the hell do you care what Nietzsche thinks? You are in the business of creating your own values, you accept no one’s rules or values but your own, etc. Nietzsche is just another source of noise; in fact, his is just another will for yours to overcome. So there’s no normative point to his view if you’re one of the free spirits.

On the other hand, if you’re not a free spirit — if you’re one of the herd — Nietzsche has, so far as I can see — given you absolutely no reason to accept any of his ideals. It may be that some ideal of human greatness is possible only through your exploitation and slavery, but on the other hand by hypothesis such ideals get no grip on you (if you could appreciate them, you would be noble, not despicable). So, once again, who the hell cares what Nietzsche has to say?

So: is there any prescriptive point to the view at all, by its own lights?

Does anyone one know if Rousseau had read Hume’s essay “Of Original Contract”? I’m teaching Hume this year in my second year history of political thought course, in between Locke and Rousseau. Hume showed that political legitimacy and obligation cannot be based on actual consent - the poor unilingual peasant has no real exit option. Remnants of an actual consent theory persist in Rousseau’s Social Contract, as in the footnote to 4.2, which says that residency implies consent and hence legitimacy of institutions only in a free state, where people have the right to leave. Yet Rousseau also advances the new view that the idea of free agreement between equals can help us design legitimate institutions, as in 1.6 of the Social Contract, where the idea of a social contract is clearly not legitimating whatever is agreed to, but rather helping us figure out what we should agree to, in order to preserve our freedom. If Rousseau had read Hume’s essay, it seems he would have distinguished these two types of consent and these two roles consent can play more clearly. I’m hoping someone can help me out with the biography / history (though also with the interpretation, if I’m missing something). For a clear misreading of this history, and its relation to Rawls, see here and compare to pp.336-7 of A Theory of Justice, in particular note 2, where Rawls says that he does not accept the whole of Hume’s argument, but believes that it is correct as applied to the political duty for citizens. (What part did Rawls not accept?)