Where Your
Philosophy
Professor
Is Coming From
The following points should help you understand where your
philosophy
professor
is coming from:
Philosophers
care
more
about your reasons than about whether you "get the right
answer."
You're not
expected to solve all the difficult
questions in
philosophy in your first philosophy course, any more than a
physics
professor
would expect you to be able to solve all the perplexing
problems of
contemporary
physics during your first physics class. One thing which
makes
philosophy
seem so strange at first is that most people believe they
have already
solved the perplexing problems of philosophy before they've
ever taken
the course. For example, most people have an opinion about
an issue
like
abortion or the existence of God, and they believe they are
right. By
contrast,
few people believe they have already discovered the correct
answer to
the
most perplexing problems of physics. However, many
philosophical issues
are really no easier or less complex than the most difficult
problems
in
physics. Knowing this, philosophy professors tend to begin
with the
assumption
that the answers to philosophical questions such as the
existence of
God
or the morality of abortion are as yet unknown. Moreover,
they do not
expect
you to be able to solve them while taking your first
philosophy course.
As a result,
philosophy professors tend to be more concerned
about teaching
you how to philosophize, that is, how to reason well about
philosophical
issues, than they are about what answer you arrive at.
This is not to say
that which answer you arrive at is
unimportant. After
all, the whole point of doing philosophy is to discover
interesting and
useful truths. But we do not expect you to be able to defend
your
answers
to philosophical questions the way someone who has thought
hard about
them
for 20 years can.
Nothing
is sacred.
A good
philosopher is willing to question anything
and everything,
even the methods of philosophy itself.
There
often seem
to be persuasive reasons which support both sides of an issue.
If you
approach philosophical arguments with an open
mind,
you'll quickly come to see this. If you've discussed several
controversial
philosophical issues in class and you don't see this, odds
are that
you're
not giving the opposing side the credit its due. As a
result, you may
not
see the point of discussing the views of the opposing side.
If this is
the case, try being more open to opposing views. One way to
do this is
to imagine that something important to you, such as winning
a court case or
getting
a great job, depends on your convincing someone of the
opposing point
of
view. What would you say to prove to them that the view you
personally
disagree with is actually true? How effective could you make
your
arguments
for your view?
That there seem to
be persuasive arguments for opposing
sides of a view
does not prove that there is no correct view. After all, if
nothing
plausible
could be said for the opposing side of an issue, it wouldn't
be an
issue
to begin with! What makes an issue an issue is that there is
something
to be said for both sides.
Where it seems
that equally plausible reasons conflict, we
have an indication
that someone's reasoning has gone astray in some subtle way.
The goal
will
be to figure out where the mistake is.
Proper Classroom Deportment Never
Hurts
Good:
Not So Good:
Additional
Resources
Douglas J.
Soccio, How To Get The Most Out Of
Philosophy,
(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 2006).
"What
Is
Philosophy?" by Keith Korcz.