Philosophy Texts

In Defense of Reading Your Philosophy Assignments

It’s hard to motivate students to read, especially primary philosophy sources. But it’s such an important way to get into conversation with great philosophers. My husband recently took a couple of college courses and I asked him what would motivate him to read. It turns out that the three things he said he wanted were exactly the same things mentioned by Eric H. Hobson, of Georgia Southern University, in his paper on how to get students to read:

https://evergreen.edu/sites/default/files/facultydevelopment/docs/Idea_Paper_40.pdf

According to Hobson, teaching a course without answering these three questions contributes to the lack of student compliance to reading assignments:

  1. Why do I need to read this?
  2. Will this be on the test?
  3. Is it possible for me to understand it?

If these questions are not answered, then we are not likely to improve on the 30% of the students who read the material we have assigned, a percentage that has remained steady for the last 30 years. These are three questions to which I will continue to try to provide answers. But here are the general ways I go about answering them:

  1. Explaining in class what you should get from or pay attention to in each reading, whether methodological or ideological, and how it fulfills at least one of the student learning outcomes of the course, and
  2. Assigning only what will be on a test (and then putting it on the test), or what can be written about in a paper, and
  3. Assigning only readings at a level appropriate for you and fitting the time we have, and recommending keeping a dictionary handy!

My student outcomes are still varied, since I continue to experiment with grading scale, assignment types, number of pages, test question types, and student choice, but I will never assign any reading that does not have an important relevant lesson to learn or that will not be tested on or that I don’t believe you can learn, if you study it.

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Multiple Author Sources

school-of-athens

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Anselm of Canterbury

The Ontological Argument

Thomas Aquinas

The Five Ways

Aristotle

aristotle

A. J. Ayer

ajayer

Terry Bisson

Buddha

Chuang Tzu

Arthur C. Danto

Vine Deloria

  • God is Red: A Native View of Religion, Vine Deloria;c1994, Available at Ventura College Main Stacks – Library (BL2776 .D44 1992 )

Rene Descartes

young-rene-descartes

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Epicurus

stern-looking-epicurus

Virginia Held

bell hooks

dblf-bell-hooks-1988-bwphoto

David Hume

painting_of_david_hume

Immanuel Kant

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

Laozi/Laotzu

lao

Helen E. Longino

J. L. Mackie

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Deirdre N. McCloskey

Michel de Montaigne

montaigne

Nietzsche

nietzsche-ree-and-salome

Linda Nochlin

Martha Nussbaum

  • The Virtues

Suzanne Pharr

Plato

gorgias

Animations and Videos of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

allegory_of_the_cave

Plato’s Dialogues about or featuring Sophists:

600full-protagoras1

euthymidesi

Plutarch

plutarch_of_chaeronea-03

Louis J. Pojman

A Critique of Ethical Relativism

Willard Van Orman Quine

wvq-age19

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

Tom Regan

The Case for Animal Rights

Bertrand Russell

russell_bertrand_young

Jean Paul Sartre

600full-jean-paul-sartre

Schopenhauer

arthur_schopenhauer_portrait_by_ludwig_sigismund_ruhl_1815

John Searle

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

duble_herma_of_socrates_and_seneca_antikensammlung_berlin_07-2

Peter Singer

Alessandra Tanesini

Bernard Williams

Ludwig Wittgenstein

wittgenstein

Susan Wolf

Meaning in Life

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