Courses | Teaching Philosophy | Information for Students
While most courses teach what we think is true, intellectual history is, for me, the study of why we think those things are true. In our age of accelerating internationalization, I believe a student can acquire no more valuable skill than the ability to cope with people who possess vastly different cultural and intellectual mindsets. An intellectual history approach, examining ideas grounded in their native cultures and historical events, gives students a sense that their core convictions too have an origin and a history, and that the majority of people past and present do not think what they think. This approach helps even in courses that do not focus on intellectual history, because without an understanding of the motivations of the actors, major movements of the past often seem foolish or crazy to students, thus not worth remembering. If one presents the Reformation or the French Revolution with a background of the political philosophies of those involved, their irrational-seeming actions become instead windows into alien modes of thought.
In syllabi, I prefer to rely on primary source readings, supplying background information in lectures or handouts, since students usually remember original texts better than summaries. One favorite technique is to use personal letters to humanize intimidatingly-famous historical figures, and help place events in order over the lifetime of a real person. In my Renaissance Florence syllabus, for example, each reading is supplemented by a selection of Machiavelli's personal letters relevant to that week's theme, be it the Black Death or gender relations. This reinforces background information with more memorable firsthand accounts, and leaves students with a more human sense, both of Machiavelli, and of the events. I also like to bring my research into the classroom, especially manuscript reproductions, and to take students to rare books libraries, since there is nothing like seeing the first edition of a world-changing book or a document in a famous author's handwriting to cement the lesson that history is real. Optional trips also let me evaluate student enthusiasm, and thus my own effectiveness in teaching.
I assess my success primarily by testing students' ability to summarize and use the ideas of authors we have covered. My goal is less that they master information short-term than that, five years from now, when the name Descartes comes up in conversation they should remember who he is and why he matters. My favorite evaluation technique is group debate, where I ask the students to explain a philosophical problem from the perspective of different sects and to challenge each other's explanations with appropriate period arguments, while anachronistic modern arguments are forbidden. This lets me see which students have absorbed which authors, while the cooperative nature of the debate also acts as a review session. Even in a general history course, debate can be focused around a political or social issue, and having a side to defend lets students practice organizing thoughts into an argument.
My favorite moment in teaching is when an excited student comes to me to say that she too subscribes to the philosophy I just lectured on, but never knew what it was called, or who came up with it. I believe that students' understandings of their own beliefs are enriched when they learn about the original circumstances which birthed them, and read the original arguments for and against, which are usually completely different from the arguments of today. Too often students seem to see history as a mere encyclopedia of the past, while I try to present it as the study of how our nations, institutions and beliefs reached their present form. In a society which looks to science for so many of its answers, it falls to the historian to supply the background for those answers, that we believe them because of the development of empirical science as a criterion of truth in the seventeenth century. If students leave my class better able to articulate why they believe what they believe, and why others think differently, then I have succeeded.