Return to the APA
Home PageThe American Philosophical Association
Newsletter on
Teaching Philosophy
Tziporah Kasachkoff, editor
Issue no. 95:1 Fall 1995
Letter from the Editors
Tziporah Kasachkoff, The Graduate Center, CUNY (tzkbm@cunyvm)
Eugene Kelly, New York Institute of Technology
(ekelly@admin.nyit.edu)
This edition of the APA Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy was scheduled as a special-topic edition dealing with the pedagogical issues and problems associated with the teaching of non-Western philosophy and cross-cultural studies. But since we did not receive sufficient contributions on the announced topic to devote the entire current issue to it, we are including here, along with the lead article on the teaching of Ancient Egyptian philosophy, three articles of a more general nature (which normally would have appeared in our OPEN issue).
Our first article, "Teaching Ancient Egyptian Philosophy," by Jay Lampert, details the sequential segments of a full-semester course which the author has taught on Egyptian philosophy. Professor Lampert offers numerous bibliographical suggestions for anthologies and texts dealing with Egyptian Philosophy as well as recommendations both for specific translations of relevant ancient works and for books that may help one to master hieroglyphic language. Professor Lampert gives the reader some idea of what is to be found in Egyptian philosophical texts, an explanation of the occasion for the creation of some of these works, an appreciation of the diverse literary forms in which these texts appear and some background concerning Egyptian customs and traditions that help us to understand the purpose of these texts. Readers who teach Egyptian Philosophy will find the annotated list of preparatory readings, commentaries and secondary literature especially helpful. The article ends with some remarks on teaching methods for the course. Professor Lampert has included a bibliography of Egyptian texts in English translation, of commentaries, and of material on Egyptian thought written by professional philosophers. There is also a short list of philosophically interesting articles in Egyptology journals.
Article number two, "On Method," by Don Fawkes, is a description of the author's procedure in a course in Critical Thinking, and contains some reflections on the goals and methods of teaching. The article is illustrated by extensive passages from Professor Fawkes' syllabus and examinations, and should be useful to those instructors who wish or who are required to assess the outcomes of their courses.
In article number three, "Dealing with Student Expectations in Practical Ethics Courses," Jim Gough shares with readers how he makes his course in Practical Ethics both more comprehensible and more welcoming to students who, typically, enroll with faulty expectations borne out of their experience as students of career- oriented courses. Professor Gough offers readers the Evaluation Guidelines, the Attitude Inventory, and the Reading and Assessment Guidelines which he hands out to students, explains how he uses each in his teaching and what students can hope to gain from them. He also takes note of some problems with their use. Readers are encouraged to use these materials and report on their usefulness for their own teaching.
Article number four, by Vance Morgan, entitled "Using Group Projects in Business Ethics Courses," explains how using specific group projects in class can help students see both that business decisions often involve collective responsibility and that ethical decision-making and business decision-making are not mutually exclusive enterprises. Professor Morgan describes the projects and the way in which groups are formed, monitored, and graded. He helpfully includes a sample of an assigned project and a Group Project Evaluation Form in an appendix.
Topics, Dates, and Deadlines for Forthcoming Issues of the Newsletter.
Spring 1996 Issue: OPEN
Deadline: CLOSED
Fall 1996: OPEN: All topics welcome
Deadline: February 1, 1996.
WE NEED TO KNOW . . .
It has been our custom to publish one OPEN and one Special Topics edition of the Newsletter each year. The Special Topics editions are devoted to papers dealing with the pedagogical issues and problems, syllabi, bibliography, etc., associated with the teaching of a particular philosophical topic (such as Hegel or Kant) or with the discussion of a particular pedagogical issue (such as course evaluations, or the teaching of introductory philosophy) while the OPEN editions have no such constraints. We need you to tell us what your interests are with respect to the Special Topics editions. Please post or e-mail us your suggestions.
Contributions of articles should be addressed to: Tziporah Kasachkoff, Philosophy Department, Graduate Center, City University of New York, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036, or to Eugene Kelly, Department of Social Science, New York Institute of Technology, Old Westbury, NY 11568. Please adhere to the following guidelines:
The author's name, the title of the paper, and full mailing address should appear on a separate sheet of paper. The title only should appear on the first line of the paper. All papers are subject to blind review.
Nothing in the body of the paper or in the footnotes should be included that could identify the author.
Please send five complete copies of the paper.
Because of space constraints we must adhere to the following guidelines: Articles should be no more than twelve double-spaced pages; reviews should be no more than 5 double-spaced pages.
Authors will please adhere to the Production Guidelines that are available from the APA, and that were published in the Spring 1994 edition of this Newsletter.
All material submitted to the Newsletter should be available on computer disk. Do not submit the disk with the paper; the editors will ask for the disk when your paper is ready to be published. In writing your paper to disk, please do not use your wordprocessor's footnote or endnote function; all notes should be added manually at the end of your paper.
All articles submitted to the Newsletter are given blind review by the members of the editorial committee. They are:
Tziporah Kasachkoff, The Graduate Center, CUNY (tzkbm@ cunyvm), co-editor;
Eugene Kelly, New York Institute of Technology (ekelly@ admin.nyit.edu), co-editor;
David B. Martens, Mount Royal College (dmartens@ mtroyal.ab.ca);
Neil Rossman, La Guardia Community College, CUNY;
Andrew Wengraf, Brooklyn College, CUNY.
Articles
Teaching Ancient Egyptian Philosophy
Jay Lampert
Howard University
Last year, I taught a full semester course in Ancient Egyptian Philosophy for the first time. Previously, I had taught Egyptian philosophy as a seven-week segment of a fourteen-week course, the other half of which consisted of early Greek philosophy. While I am offering here a scheme for the entire course, there are of course many ways to approach the material, and one could well include a limited treatment (of as short as a week) of Egyptian philosophy as part of a survey course in Ancient Philosophy, or in any course from Philosophy of Religion, to Hermeneutics, to Aesthetics.
There is a growing interest in Egyptian thought from the perspective of its possible influence on Greek philosophy on the one hand and on African philosophy on the other. My own preference is to study Ancient Egyptian thought on its own terms rather than in terms of how it may have influenced successors.1
Texts
A great deal of translated material is now available. Translations in Miriam Lichtheim's three volume Ancient Egyptian Literature (see Reading List below) constitute almost enough material for a course. Overlapping with the above, a number of cosmological (some more descriptive, some more speculative) texts are translated with commentary in Marshall Claggett's Ancient Egyptian Science. R. O. Faulkner has translated three volumes of The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts and one volume of The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts as well as The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. For readers of German, see K. Sethe's Urkunde des agyptische Altertums (since 1955, Berlin).
One can teach an introductory course in Ancient Egyptian philosophy without reading heiroglyphs, but since the nature of heiroglyphic writing is itself a philosophical issue, one might want to learn the language at some point. Alan Gardiner's textbook Egyptian Grammar2 (Oxford: Griffith Institute, 1927) is well designed pedagogically in the earlier chapters, and can make a good start along with Faulkner's A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian (Oxford: Griffith Institute, 1962) and A. de Buck's Egyptian Readingbook: Exercise and Middle Egyptian Texts (Leiden: Nederlands Institut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1963).
The Egyptian philosophical texts offer cosmologies and cosmogonies, treatments of time and history and eternity, ethical teachings and analyses of justice and power, accounts of the gods and of the structured relations between them, divisions of the soul and narratives of eternal life, descriptions of the power of language and other sign systems, and subtle manipulations of mythological systems that elaborate the widest possible range of philosophical issues, from the relation between the One and the Many, to the divine nature of wordplay, to the analysis of life-giving as well as hostile forces. The Egyptian texts are highly speculative, carefully developed under a scholarly tradition that rigorously followed set rhetorical and discursive patterns for the explication of ontological and ethical systems. Many were written as part of a project to bring about the eternal life of the dead. The early speculative texts were written directly onto the walls of the king's tomb inside a pyramid. Later, versions were written onto the insides of the coffins of lesser nobles (hence the "Coffin texts"), and later still, in papyrus books (literally titled "The Book of Coming Forth by Day" but often translated as "The Book of the Dead") that could be placed in the tombs of people of more modest means. Insofar as the discursive contexts of Egyptian writing are significantly different from contemporary academic writing, the reading of Egyptian texts not only offers ideas for a philosophy of soul, cosmos, ethics, and so on, but also raises the issue of what kinds of methodologies philosophy might follow, and what kinds of cultural functions it might have.
The texts themselves take a variety of forms. The Pyramid texts, the Coffin texts, and the "Book of the Dead" texts, sometimes referred to collectively as mortuary literature, are divided into short "chapters" of several genres. Some of these chapters are creation accounts; some are hymns (though in referring to "hymns," I don't intend to make assumptions about what it means for a text to praise attributes of a god); some are dialogues or exegeses discussing the nature of a god or the structured relation between gods; some are descriptions of the parts of the soul; some are descriptions of the trial that the deceased will face when he reawakens-a trial during which the deceased will have to prove that he lived a just life-along with a list of the specific forms of activity that constitute justice; some are descriptions of eternal life; some are instructions for how to proceed along the underworld geography in order to reach the other side, including words to say to defeat the intervening enemies, and ritual ceremonies for returning to life, etc.
A second kind of text involves writings on other sorts of monuments, stelae, temples, and palaces. In addition to historical and biographical inscriptions, some of which are interesting for the ethical presumptions, political machinations, and historiographic values they reveal (e.g. concerning the idea of the fulfilment of the past in the present and modelling of the present on the past, the role of divine intervention in history, and the role of the great individual), there are important cosmological treatises in this form. A third kind of text is known as "Instruction Texts." Some of these take the form of advice from a father to his son on how to live a good life; others take the forms of prophesy, social critique, rhetorical persuasion, or speculation regarding the ontological origin of universal harmony. Fourth, there are scientific, mathematical and medical papyri that to some extent reveal a kind of philosophy of science (both in terms of an ontology of nature and in terms of standards of evidence and falsification).
Within each of the above genres, there are texts exhibiting a wide variety of approaches. Ranging over 2500 years (beginning about 3100 BCE) of intellectual pursuits and social changes, these texts express many perspectives on theology, many attitudes to civil and political society, many speculations on the first cause, etc. At the same time, Egyptian culture valued continuity, so there are many texts that one could teach as representative of Egyptian philosophy without having to present the whole history of Egyptian philosophies.
The typical Egyptian theoretical text is synthetic and follows what I call a logic of elaborative exegesis. Rather than argue for one position as opposed to alternatives, the typical text expresses its originality by reorganizing under a new system all the positions at hand. A theological text will syncretize the gods of newly incorporated cities into a unifying theological system. A narrative usually ascribed to one god will sometimes be written with another god in place of the first. Similarly, a deceased human may substitute for a god. In general, one could read Egyptian philosophy as a study of the processes by which beings are identified with one another when they take on each other's forms and functions. Concepts are analyzed in terms of the systems of interconnection and interchange within which they function. In the same way, an ethical text will call upon the wisdom of the earliest sages even when it is promoting a largely novel theory of the good, a historical text will associate current events with past events, and so on. While there are important controversies among ancient Egyptian thinkers that become clear once one has read a few texts, working with these texts requires the reader to attend to subtle structures of synthesizing schematics.
Preparatory readings, commentaries, secondary literature.
I begin the course with a lecture or two sketching the history of ancient Egypt (or Kemet, the Egyptian name for Egypt), but there are many helpful texts. For a broad social history of Egyptian civilization, one might start with Kees's Ancient Egypt: A Cultural Topography (London, 1961) or Wilson's The Burden of Egypt: An Interpretation of Ancient Egyptian Culture (Chicago, 1951), though of course any single account has its own agenda. For essays arguing for the African roots of Egyptian societies, see Karenga and Carruthers (eds.), Kemet and the African Worldview (University of Sankore Press, 1986).
More important are overviews of the conceptual schemes of ancient Egyptian thought. I have found Claggett and Lesko (in Shafer) to be good introductions. There are a number of Egyptologists who have written accounts of Egyptian thought; my own preferences are listed below. Turn-of-the-century works by Budge and others contain valuable ideas but are often limited by Victorian assumptions regarding the relative primitiveness of the ancient world, the alleged superiority of monotheism over other theologies, the role of animal worship and of magic in ancient thought, etc. Only a very few articles on Egyptian thought have appeared in philosophical journals. I have listed some below.
Suggested syllabus materials and discussion topics.
Segment 1. Introductory topics.
I begin with an overview of Egyptian cosmogonical systems. I concentrate on six cosmogonies, dealing, respectively, with the god Atum and the concept of form, Ra and rebirth, Aten and oneness, Ptah and intellect, Kheper and becoming, and kings and continuity.
In addition to discussing the concepts in these particular systems, I also begin a discussion of the kind of systems these are. Here I discuss such issues as (1) the relations among myth, science, religion, and philosophy, (2) whether hieroglyphic language, as a combination of pictographic, symbolic, and phonetic signs, inherently expresses a metaphysics different from that expressed by a purely phonetic language, (3) the nature of an ontology that proceeds under the names of gods: first, what is meant by a "god" (ntr-a deity, an emblem, a natural force); second, why ontology might be articulated in the form of personified narrative rather than definitions and arguments; third, whether the various cosmogonical systems are mutually consistent and synthesizable. We have to ask in a fresh way if we really know what it means to call something a god, if we really know the difference between monotheism and polytheism, if we really know what it means to say there was a beginning to the world, or that there is a soul, or that there is a life on the other side of death, and so on. If ancient philosophy is worth studying, it is ultimately because it aids in the analysis of the philosophical questions themselves.
Segment 2. The "Book of the Dead."
I begin the textual portion of the course with this text partly because it is a long text, and partly because the issues of the afterlife are so central to Egyptian thought. Again, an introduction is necessary for students. I find helpful Budge's account of the divisions of "soul" (in the "Introduction" to his translation), even though his accounts of the difference between ba (something like "power," often translated into English as "soul"), ka (something like "image" or "double," but sometimes also translated as "soul"), akh (something like "spirit" in the sense of having been made excellent or efficient by renewal), are controversial in their details. Students will also need a brief summary of the Osirian myth cycle. Plutarch presents a systematic version of the narrative, but the Egyptian texts seem never to have rendered the entire story, possibly because the death and dismemberment of Osiris was considered an inappropriate subject for representation. Each stage in the narrative symbolism can become the subject for a philosophical discussion-the god's death and dismemberment (stimulating a discussion, for example, concerning the humanization of the divine-comparable to Christ and Dionysius-or concerning the division of a divine oneness into a bodily manyness); the conflict between Osiris (associated with rebirth and the founding of society) and Seth (associated with destruction); the familial relations of the narrative and in cosmogony generally; the lamentations of Isis (Osiris's sister-wife) and her reassembling of Osiris; the victory of Horus (son of Osiris and Isis) against Seth at a subsequent trial before the gods; the apparent materiality of the afterlife, and so on.3
Also, it is worthwhile to discuss how we ought to interpret philosophical texts written on the inside walls of pyramids, where presumably the principal reader of the text was intended to be a dead man. This raises interesting problems for the nature of writing (not necessarily as communication or even as display), and for the nature of interpretation. One problem is whether to read the texts literally or metaphorically, or whether that very distinction is anachronistic.
There are two chapters of the text that I find especially suitable for philosophical discussion. One is Chapter 17 (chapter numbers have been standardized across variant texts). It takes the form of questions and answers which set forth the identifications between the deceased human and various gods and their attributes. For example: "Who then is this? It is Ra, the creator of the names of his limbs, which came into being in the form of the gods in the train of Ra. Who then is this? It is Tmu in his disk. I am yesterday; I know tomorrow. . . ." The text may be intended as a kind of dialogue between gods, and it may have been produced as scribes over time added glosses (or perhaps they should be read as critiques) to an originally simpler text. Among the many issues that this text raises is the problem of identification and syncretism. After death, humans are said to become gods, just as gods become other gods. In the overlapping narratives of gods and humans, the methodological presumption is that the way to analyze a concept is through more and more elaborations, more and more narrative interchanges, characterizations, and identifications. Readers interested in issues of synthesis and the ontology of becoming might be particularly interested in this text. A second passage of particular philosophical interest is Chapter 125, which contains the so-called "Negative Confessions." This is a description of what will take place during the trial that the deceased will have to undergo in order to prove that he lived a just life. It contains the forty-two crimes that the defendant must prove he did not commit. This text begins to give a sense of the concept of maat (translatable as "justice," "truth," or "harmony").
Segment 3: Cosmologies and cosmogonies.
Many interpreters get caught in the issue of whether cosmogony is low-level natural science, or pure imagination, or a metaphor of something else. There may be some truth to each of these, but in addition, my own sense is that to take a philosophy seriously includes trying to think of that philosophy as true. So I try to think about what it would mean if the sun really is a god, and likewise for other Egyptian doctrines.
Of the six cosmogonies I listed above, the first and second might be called the most traditional. In the first, Atum ("the complete one"-later texts give a similar role to Amun, "the Hidden One") generates a series of increasingly unhidden successors (culminating in air, earth, water, and sun) and so presents a scheme of formlessness taking on form. The second is the solar cosmogony of the gods Ra, Osiris, Isis, Horus, and Seth, and focuses on eternal renewal. Osiris's victory over death is the victory of being over non-being.
The third cosmogony, the "Amarna heresy," had a brief prominence around 1350 BCE. The doctrine concerning Aten, the sun-disk, is in some interpretations the world's first thoroughgoing monism. Some interpreters argue that it was indeed monism and therefore the greatest philosophical discovery of the ancient world; others argue that it was monism but therefore constituted a decay of the sounder metaphysics of multiplicity found in traditional Egyptian thought; still others argue that it was not in fact a radical departure from the dialectic of One and Many in traditional Egyptian polytheism.
The fourth, the "Memphite cosmology" centers on Ptah, the craftsman, who creates the world through intellect and language. This offers an account of the centrality of mind in the cosmos and the sense that particulars are expressions of the One. The fifth centers on Kheper, the beetle who gives birth to itself, and involves a metaphysics of self-development, which finds parallels from Plotinus to Hegel (see Lampert).
The sixth cosmology involves the Egyptian royalty as signifiers of divine creation and guarantors of the continuity of the created world. In the Pyramid of Unas, there is a description of the transformation of the King Unas into a god, in which Unas is said to "eat the gods." This introduces the issue of the divinity of kings and nations as well as the issue of the role of the body in Egyptian thought.
In addition to these positive cosmologies, I deal also with a number of Egyptian texts that challenge the conception of the afterlife. In addition to harpers' songs that advocate living a full life instead of worrying about an unknown afterlife, there are ethical texts that question whether anyone actually knows about the future, and there is a very interesting text known as "The Conversation Between a Man and His Ba" (in Lichtheim) in which the two voices debate whether suicide is a possible way of improving one's existence. The man says yes, but his ba says no. It is interesting to think of one's soul not as an inner voice but as a self that hovers above one, who reasons better than the man himself and does not especially approve of him.
Segment 4: Texts concerning ethics, politics, historiography, and discourse.
The tradition of texts known as "Instruction Texts" runs from Old Kingdom to Ptolemaic times. The early texts emphasize self-control, fair use of wealth and power, confidence in the will of the gods and in the ultimate justice of social institutions, and in general decorous behavior that quietly shows the world that one is deserving of respect. Later texts (particularly during and after periods of social upheaval) gradually show less confidence in gods and societies, sometimes lamenting the inverted world where beggars are kings, and gradually shift in emphasis from an ethics of magnanimity to an ethics of internal conscience. This is over-simplifying, but the issues of behavior vs. conscience, public success vs. ideal justice, social stability and propriety vs. social reform and outspokenness, royal prerogative vs. egalitarianism, and divine law vs. personal struggle, are primary themes within the overall conception of maat, or harmony.
The histories written on monuments to glorify kings reveal interesting and difficult issues in the philosophy of history. For example, King Pepi II (c. 2150 BCE) listed the kings of Lybia whom he had supposedly defeated by actually copying the list of kings who had been defeated by King Sahure two hundred years earlier. Some interpreters argue that this implies a lack of concern for actual history in favor of eternal and essentialist concerns. Others think it implies a cyclical conception of history. My own view is that the key point of such texts is the bunching up of events around nodal points and the attribution of transcendental significance to individual events by means of retracing present events into glorious events of the past (not to mention structuring the possibility of events in the future).
In terms of a theory of discourse, in addition to issues of hieroglyphs and symbolism, there are texts written (by scribes) arguing for the value of scribes and the life of the intellect. Some argue that the only sort of immortality that a human can achieve is in the writing of a book. Some commentators (including Hegel) have argued that Egyptian buildings are hieroglyphs writ large, and that architecture is the language of Egyptian thought.
Teaching methods.
What stands out in Egyptian texts is of course the mythological framework of much of the metaphysics, and the elaborative rather than argumentative development of ideas. This means that much of the student's work involves developing a way of reading the texts philosophically. Students gain from doing a lot of exegetical work early in the semester, and I ask students to build up to writing a four-page exegesis of a ten-line extract of text. One way or another, it is important for students to achieve a degree of facility in Egyptian mythology without the class time itself being filled with storytelling. By the end of the term, students should be able to write the same kind of term paper they would write in any other course. I have received term papers that compared theories of justice across different Egyptian texts, papers that analyzed ontologies from specific texts, papers that argued against the Egyptian concept of "god," papers that compared Egyptian systems of thought to Platonic texts, a paper that criticized, and then tried to improve, the assumptions of free will made in the "Negative Confessions," a paper that compared the Egyptian concept of symbolism to that of traditional African philosophies, among others.
SUGGESTED READING MATERIALS
The readings offered here are not intended as an exhaustive bibliography, but as a starting point for philosophers interested in teaching or studying Egyptian philosophy.
Egyptian texts in English translation
Budge, E. A. Wallis. The Egyptian Book of the Dead. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1967. (Some suspicious translations.)
-----. The Gods of the Egyptians. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1969. (Various texts with commentary.)
Claggett, Marshall. Ancient Egyptian Science: A Sourcebook (volume 1, tome 2). Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1989.
Faulkner, R. O. The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
-----. The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts (3 volumes). Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1973-1978.
-----. The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. New York: Macmillan, 1985.
Lichtheim, Miriam. Ancient Egyptian Literature (3 volumes). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973-1980.
Sethe, K. Urkunde des agyptische Altertums, Leipzig and Berlin, 1906- .
Simpson, William Kelly. The Literature of Ancient Egypt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
General Commentaries
Allen, J. P. Creation in Egypt: The Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation Accounts. New Haven: Yale Egyptological Series 2, 1988.
Asante, Molefi Kete. Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge. Trenton: Africa World Press, Inc., 1990.
Claggett, Marshall. Ancient Egyptian Science (volume 1, tome 1). Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1989.
Frankfort, Henry. Ancient Egyptian Religion: An Interpretation. New York: Harper and Row, 1961.
Frankfort, H., H. A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson, and Thorkild Jacobson. Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1951.
Groenewegen-Frankfort, H. A. Arrest and Movement: Space and Time in the Art of the Ancient Near East. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987.
Hornung, Erik. The One and the Many: Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt (tr. John Baines). Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.
-----. Idea into Image: Essays on Ancient Egyptian Thought (tr. Elizabeth Bredeck). New York: Timken Publishers, 1992.
Karenga, Maulana. The Book of Coming Forth by Day: The Ethics of the Declarations of Innocence. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 1990.
Morenz, Siegfried. Egyptian Religion (tr. Ann E. Keep). Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973.
Obenga, Theophile. Ancient Egypt and Black Africa (tr. Sylvianne Martinon and Ahmed Sheik, ed. Amon Saba Saakana). London: Karnak House, 1992.
Redford, Donald B. Akhenaten: The Heretic King. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Shafer, Byron E. (ed.). Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths, and Personal Practice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Zabkar, L. V. A Study of the Ba Concept in Ancient Egyptian Texts. The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 34, Chicago 1968.
Articles and chapters on Egyptian thought written
by professional philosophers
Bernasconi, Robert. "The Anglican Bishop and the Pagan Priests: Warburton and the Hermeneutics of Egyptian Hieroglyphs." Archivo di Filosofia, Anno LX-1992 N. 1-3, pp. 131-144.
Derrida, Jacques. "The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel's Semiology." In Margins of Philosophy (tr. Alan Bass), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, pp. 69-108.
-----. Dissemination (tr. Barbara Johnson), Part 2, Chapter 1, Section 3: "The Filial Inscription: Theuth, Hermes, Thoth, Nabu, Nebo." Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp. 84-94.
Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: One Volume Edition: The Lectures of 1827 (tr. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart, ed. Peter C. Hodgson). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, pp. 313-327.
-----. The Philosophy of History (tr. J. Sibree). London: The Colonial Press, 1900, pp. 198-219. (See also various sections of Hegel's Aesthetics.)
Kadish, Gerald E. "Observations on Time in Ancient Egyptian Culture." Papers on Ancient Greek and Islamic Philosophy Series published by The Institute of Global Cultural Studies of Binghamtom University, 1993.
Lampert, Jay. "Hegel and Ancient Egypt: History and Becoming." International Philosophical Quarterly, 1995, 35, pp. 43-58.
McEvoy, James. "Plato and the Wisdom of Egypt." Irish Philosophical Journal, 1, Autumn 1984, pp. 1-24.
Voegelin, Erik. Order and History, Vol. 1: Israel and Revelation, Part 1, Chapter 3: "Egypt." Louisiana State University Press, 1956, pp. 52-110.
Westphal, Merold. God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion, Chapter 10c: "Mimesis in ancient Egypt." Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, pp. 208-218.
Whitson, Robley Edward. "Immortality and Transcendence in Egyptian Thought." International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 2, 1962, pp. 515-537.
Short sample of philosophically interesting
articles in Egyptology journals
Egyptology journals in which one frequently finds philosophically interesting articles include Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Journal of the American Research Council in Egypt, and Zeitschrift fur Agyptische Sprache. The Lexikon der Agyptologie (ed. Wolfgang Kelck, Eberhard Otto, and Wolfhart Westendorf), 7 volumes, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1972-, is a kind of encyclopedia of Egyptian studies, written by dozens of scholars, with articles in English, German, and French.
Baines, John. "Ancient Egyptian concepts and uses of the past: 3rd to 2nd millenium BC evidence." In Layton, Robert (ed.), Who Needs the Past: Indigenous Values and Archaeology. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989, pp. 131-149.
Bleeker, C. J. "Isis and Nephthys as Wailing Women." Numen, V, 1958, pp. 1-17.
Brandon, S. G. F. "The Ritual Perpetuation of the Past." Numen, VI, 1959, pp. 112-129.
Griffiths, J. Gwyn. "Triune Conceptions of Deity in Ancient Egypt." ZAS, 100, 1973, pp. 28-32.
Hankoff, L. D. "Body-Mind Concepts in the Ancient Near East: A Comparison of Egypt and Israel in the Second Millenium BC." In Rieber, R. W. (ed.), Body and Mind: Past, Present, and Future. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1980, pp. 3-33.
Lesko, Barbara. "True Art in Ancient Egypt." In Lesko, Leonard H. (ed.), Egyptological Studies in Honor of Richard A. Parker. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986, pp. 85-97.
Oden, Robert A. Jr. "'The Contendings of Horus and Seth' (Chester Beatty Papyrus No. 1): A Structural Interpretation." History of Religions, Vol. 18, 1978, pp. 352-369.
Roth, Ann Macy. "The pss-kf and the 'Opening of the Mouth' Ceremony: A Ritual of Birth and Rebirth." JEA 78, 1992, pp. 113-147.
te Velde, H. "Some Remarks on the Structure of Egyptian Divine Triads." JEA, 57, 1971, pp. 80-86.
Tobin, Vincent Arieh. "Ma at and ike: Some Comparative Considerations of Egyptian and Greek Thought." JARCE, XXIV, 1987, pp. 113-121.
Endnotes
1. Martin Bernal's two volumes of Black Athena (Rutgers University Press, Vol. 1, 1987, Vol. 2, 1991) has reminded us of the historical issues of cultural, linguistic, and other influences, but they do not focus on specifically philosophical influences. Within the discipline of Classics, Bernal's works continue to be controversial. For a variety of critical evaluations, along with a response from Bernal, see the Classics journal Arethusa: Special Issue: The Challenge of "Black Athena," Fall 1989, particularly the introductory article by Molly Myerowitz Levine (and see her other literature reviews elsewhere) and the article by Frank M. Snowden, Jr., concerning what the concept of race did and did not mean in the ancient world (and see also his important work, Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).
Familiar commentaries on pre-Socratic philosophy typically refer to the issue of Egyptian influence only in passing, and many discussions of Plato's references to Egypt assume that Plato invented "Egyptian" sources for his own purposes. This may be largely true, but one cannot test this without a thorough background in both Egyptian and Greek philosophy. Unfortunately, very few scholars have expertise in both. Some classicists, linguists, and historians of religion read both languages, but few of these are trained in philosophy. As a result, many treatments of the possible influence of Egyptian philosophy on Greek philosophy are either thin on detail or polemical. On one extreme, one frequently finds the assumption that whatever the Egyptians were doing it was not philosophy. On the other extreme of the polemic, there is George C. M. James' Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy (N.Y.: Philosophical Library, 1954).
A continuity of Egyptian philosophy in contemporary African philosophies is argued for in a number of texts. There is interesting and controversial material in works by Obenga, Karenga, and Asante. Much of the foundational work was done by Cheik Anta Diop.
2. Gardiner's division of Egyptian verb forms into imperfective and perfective (i.e. continuing and complete) instead of past, present and future, has been challenged. H. J. Polotsky has argued that some verb forms are originally and essentially noun forms (see for example "Egyptian Tenses" in Collected Papers, Jerusalem: Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, 1971).
3. There are a number of ancient texts concentrating on specific features of the cycle, which the instructor can read in preparation, such as the "Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys," and the "Contendings of Horus and Seth" (in Lichtheim).
On Method
Don Fawkes
Fayetteville State University, North Carolina
This paper presents some content, but mainly methodology employed in a required freshman Critical Thinking (CT) course, Philosophy 110, (25 to 35 sections per semester) at Fayetteville State University, North Carolina. The methods have been employed since the course began in the Fall of 1989, and are applicable to courses in virtually any discipline. I have developed courses also in introductory ethics, philosophy of science, and in other areas using the methodology. For the CT course we owe thanks to Scriven for both method and content; to Mager and Pipe for method; and, to Moore and Parker for content. (See references.)
The course is organized on the basis of the following principles:
1. Student behavioral objectives are written.
2. Student behavioral objectives are provided to each student.
3. Test items measure only objectives, and each test item is cross-referenced to (an) objective(s).
4. Exercises provide practice relevant to objectives, and are cross-referenced to objective(s).
5. Grading standards are provided to students, in writing, at the outset of the course.
6. Classroom time is devoted entirely to students' accomplishment of objectives.
7. Students are provided frequent opportunities for obtaining feedback on their performance, and frequent grading opportunities.
8. Criterion-referenced (cross-referenced to course objectives) pre-and-post testing indicates changes in students' level of skill in meeting specific objectives, and provides a basis for course improvement, and comparison with final grades across sections, SAT scores, GPA's, grades in other courses, etc.
The major aim is to produce as much student practice, relevant to objectives, as possible. Accordingly, there are no lectures. Assigned graded homework is required in advance of class discussion; this ensures that the text is the students' primary resource for graded exercises. Early in the course we rely on Moore and Parker's discussion of why learning CT skills is worthwhile, and use it as a basis for classroom discussion. Teachers spend class time working with students (usually in small groups) on exercises. These small groups periodically report their reasoning and conclusions to the class and further discussion proceeds if needed. Teachers provide explanations only in response to questions, and then immediately return students to the completion of exercises. This approach to classroom activity allows students to discuss issues with each other and allows instructors to discuss unique, individual responses of students in small groups, fostering a spontaneity and humanity of interaction that more formal lecture and discussion approaches often lack. With my own students often I ask small group members, in explaining their answer to the class, also to explain arguments for a wrong answer and why they fail, and/or to explain failed arguments for a correct answer, and/or to justify several correct answers, and so on.
Instructors accustomed to lecturing often fear that without giving lectures (or "beginning class with explanations") they will not be able to "cover" material at a suitable pace, but this concern is unfounded. With reading and graded exercises in advance, once teachers learn simply to put students in small groups and to put them to work on specific exercises, the pace quickens, rather than slowing down. The students give the explanations. Only rarely do the groups get "stumped" and in those cases, when the teacher does need to explain, virtually everyone is listening, and interested. Furthermore, it is all too often a complaint of teachers using more traditional methods that students will not read. But perhaps students are being reinforced in such behavior. If the teacher "explains" in class, why should they read? There are, after all, many other perceived demands on their time, and in such circumstances they may perceive reading to be unnecessary. Note also that most students can advance faster and retain more from reading (at least when it is linked to graded exercises), than they can from exposure to a lecture.
The course is designed based on certain fundamental claims regarding critical thinking: Everyone, or almost everyone attempts to think critically. Everyone or almost everyone can improve critical thinking skills. Generalizable critical thinking skills can be learned through practice with particular examples; a wide variety of practice with a wide variety of particular examples increases the likelihood that generally useful critical thinking skills and the disposition to use them will be acquired. It is in the practice of CT skills that one comes to see their merit, and thus acquires critical thinking dispositions. Critical thinking skills and dispositions improve with practice and decline without practice. Practice means active participation (written and oral), not passive attention.
Some typical skills and dispositions practiced (taught) in the course are the following:
- recognizing and developing claims
- distinguishing claims from other uses of language
- identifying issues
- recognizing and developing conclusions
- recognizing and developing premises
- recognizing and developing arguments
- recognizing ambiguity and unclarity in claims
- clarifying claims
- evaluating claims in terms of clarity and precision
- recognizing roles of context in determining meaning
- distinguishing knowledge from belief
- distinguishing fact from opinion
- identifying and avoiding errors in reasoning (informal and formal fallacies)
- assessing the relevance of claims to other claims
- discerning whether pairs of claims are contrary, contradictory, not in conflict, or paradoxical
- evaluating evidence and sources of evidence
- distinguishing arguments from explanations
- distinguishing phenomena from explanations
- identifying and evaluating different kinds of explanations
- distinguishing valid from invalid arguments
- developing valid arguments
- developing sound arguments
- developing strong arguments
- assessing whether a deductive argument is sound
- assessing whether an inductive argument is strong
- identifying and evaluating inductive generalizations
- identifying and evaluating causal arguments
- distinguishing prescriptive, moral, and nonprescriptive claims
- identifying and evaluating moral claims and moral arguments
A list such as this may leave the false impression that the items listed are epistemologically or metaphysically unproblematic, so I hasten to dissolve that chimera. For philosophers working with students on say, causation or fact/opinion distinctions, there is an opportunity to introduce students to the subtleties of argument that surround such initially prosaic matters (however the introductory CT textbook may deal with them). Our method allows the philosopher to address such philosophical subtleties precisely at a point where students express an interest. In traditional lecture/discussion formats philosophers assume student interest in such issues. With our method, philosophically problematic matters arise naturally from students as they work through exercises. For professional philosophers these circumstances are ideal, and it is rarely even necessary to prompt students with a Socratic question as one works with the groups. More often, it is the students who raise interesting philosophical issues, and then, when the philosopher responds, virtually every student is interested, and engaged by the discussion. These are opportunities surely not to be missed. And there is no conflict between discussing such subtleties, and helping students to complete exercises on a stipulated understanding of causation or on a stipulated fact/opinion distinction. In fact, such exercises are again, surely philosophical opportunities not to be missed.
For professional philosophers our method does not pose any danger of oversimplification, but rather presents genuine philosophical opportunities for genuine philosophical instruction. So, especially with our interactive method, there is simply no substitute for teachers who are philosophers. Complex philosophical issues appear in the course of discussions with students engaged in solving problems, and the professor needs well grounded knowledge in logic, epistemology, metaphysics and ethics to be able to deal spontaneously with questions and issues that regularly arise. The professional philosopher is uniquely qualified to help students probe the limits of knowledge and to recognize unresolved issues; and, the professional philosopher is also uniquely qualified to deal with students' questions in an introductory course and to judge how best to return students promptly to exercises. Unfortunately however, we have to rely (at present) on nonphilosophers for a portion of the teaching load. This necessity raises the risk of oversimplification, dogmatic treatment, omissions, etc. (More about this problem below.)
Specifics of the method can best be conveyed through a review of course materials. The figures that follow offer "snapshots" from the syllabus and an exam. (I have condensed the figures somewhat from the actual course materials in order to save printing space here.) Figures 1 and 2 show parts of the syllabus. Note that objectives are cross-referenced to reading, and to homework assignments. The objectives also serve as a guide to teachers for class activities.
Figures 3, 4, and 5 show typical parts of exams, and are matched to the syllabus material in figures 1 and 2. Note that specific objectives are given for each test item. (Sample exam questions are from Moore and Parker, 1992.)
Figures 6 and 7 present selections from the syllabus giving grading standards and giving guidelines for the four essays required during the course.
Prospect and Retrospect
When we compared pre-and-post test results of students who had taken the CT course with a control group of students who had taken other standard first semester courses but not the CT course, we found a statistically significant improvement in CT skills among those who had taken the CT course and virtually no change in scores for the control group. This result is not surprising. Many would predict such an outcome on the basis that basic philosophical skills, like those listed above, are unlikely to be acquired unless specifically taught. Further, our results are compatible with Facione's carefully accomplished pre-and-post test study that,
. . . the claim that CT is a naturally occurring by-product of good college instruction seems doubtful. The control group courses were selected because they were generally regarded as solid offerings by more than competent faculty. These colleagues expected improvement in CT skills to be part of what would naturally result from the students' experiences with the kinds of questions discussed and kinds of teaching strategies normally employed in introductory philosophy courses. (Facione 1990, 17)
In the light of considerations such as these, administrative policies that require a CT course for freshmen but not for transfer students, or that assume that CT skills will be acquired by completing other courses (including other philosophy courses), are ill advised.
We are making plans to try several nationally normed pre-and-post tests (some of which are also criterion referenced), and to cross-norm the results with our own criterion-referenced pre-and-post test; this will produce both criterion-referenced and norm-referenced information vis-a-vis our results.
Since I do not normally deal with statistical measures, I am grateful to Dr. William E. McMullin of our Institutional Research Office for providing the following figures representing average student overall evaluations on student evaluation surveys for the CT course (Phil.110) and two other required first semester freshman courses. The rating scale is from 1 to 5, with 5 representing highest approval and 1 representing least approval.
Phil. 110 Math 121 English 110
Overall Rating 4.21 4.15 4.05
The ratings are for Fall '92/Spring '93. Dr. McMullin tells me that these ratings are typical. The CT course generally shows a very slight lead in general student approval over these other courses. We are discussing the preparation of a report of our pre-and-post test and student survey results, but the main point is that these results have been quite uniform and positive. As for the puzzling question of whether or not specific CT skills actually get transferred by students to their studies in other courses, we remain stuck (as are most courses) with anecdotal evidence. Fortunately, that evidence has been generally positive. Several of the philosophers here can rehearse tales of the psychology professor, or the history professor who mentions in passing that this or that from the CT course is improving students' reasoning. "How do you know?" I always ask. Usually, the answer is that the students say that they "learned it" in the CT course. This is not to say that there are no faculty "nay-sayers"; there are. But generally, responses are positive.
Social recognition of the general need for the ancient skills and dispositions of philosophy now often taught in CT courses at American colleges seems to be on the rise. However, we are still at a curious stage in which those without preparation in philosophy are being called upon to teach the skills and dispositions of philosophical analysis. Yet, most accrediting bodies have a minimal preparation requirement of eighteen (or more) semester credit hours (or quarter equivalent) in a discipline to qualify a college teacher to teach in that discipline. For example, engineers sometimes teach algebra or statistics courses under this sort of minimal preparation requirement. The time may be right for the philosophy profession to take an interest in the matter of preparation of instructors in CT courses. To use an analogy, psychologists, economists, engineers, political scientists, physicists, biologists, sociologists, historians, and others need to use statistical thinking in their disciplines and in their classrooms. To do that, both they and their students must have acquired statistical thinking skills and dispositions through a course in statistics taught by a qualified teacher. That course must be preceded by a course in algebra taught by a qualified teacher. A CT course is most closely matched to the algebra course in this analogy, and there is no discipline in which these skills and dispositions of philosophy are not needed.
The methodology continues to develop and change, based on experience. If you would like a copy of an updated 15 page syllabus (warts and all!), please send a request, along with $3.00 (to cover handling and mailing) to me, Dr. Don Fawkes, 35550 Eutaw, Fayetteville, NC 28303-0550.
REFERENCES
Facione, Peter A., The California Critical Thinking Skills Test-College Level, Technical Report #1, Experimental Validation and Content Validity (Millbrae, California: California Academic Press, 1990).
Mager, Robert F., Developing Attitude Toward Learning (Belmont, California: Fearon-Pitman Publishers, 1968).
Mager, Robert F., Preparing Instructional Objectives (Belmont, California: Fearon Publishers, 1975).
Mager, Robert F., Instructional Module Development (Los Altos, California: Mager Associates, Inc., 1977).
Mager, Robert F. and Pipe, Peter, Criterion Referenced Instruction: Analysis, Design, and Implementation (Los Altos, California: Mager Associates, Inc., 1979).
Moore, Brooke Noel, and Parker, Richard, Critical Thinking (Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1992).
Scriven, Michael, Reasoning (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976).
Scriven, Michael, Evaluation Thesaurus (Inverness, California: Edgepress, 1980).
Scriven, Michael, The Logic of Evaluation (Inverness, California: Edgepress, 1980).
Scriven, Michael, Introduction to Evaluation (Inverness, California: Edgepress, 1981).
Figure 1 (selection from syllabus: course outline)
V. COURSE OBJECTIVES AND COURSE OUTLINE
1. Some of the objectives (marked with an asterisk, *) can be answered directly; you should prepare written answers to these objectives in preparation for exams. The remaining objectives require response to exercises, and practice with these exercises is the other method needed to prepare for exams. Many objectives require both kinds of response (written answer and practice with exercises). Completing homework assignments will make this clear. Each homework assignment is matched to objectives, and the objectives also match planned classroom activities, essays, and each test item.
2. A few objectives for the course are placed inside of brackets,
{ }. These brackets indicate that the objective has a broad and/or speculative nature, and that the material may go beyond the scope of the Moore and Parker text. You should return to these bracketed objectives from time to time, and re-think the responses you would give to them. You will be advised in advance when these objectives are included in exams.
Chapter 1: "WHAT IS CRITICAL THINKING?"
STUDENT OBJECTIVES
*1. Distinguish claims from other types of verbal expressions, such as questions, commands, and exclamations. *2. Define critical thinking. *3. Distinguish premises and conclusions. *4. Explain the differences between logic and critical thinking. 5. Identify three purposes for which claims are made: a. to convey information, b. to affect attitudes, c. to influence behavior. *6. Distinguish claims supported by reasons from those not supported by reasons. *7. Explain the term "issue" as it is related to claims and arguments. 8. Identify the issues addressed by specific arguments. *9. Define the term argument.
Class
Hour Objectives
2 Ch.1: (Aug. 26): Read this syllabus. Read pp. 2-20 1 thru 9 and complete exercise 1-1. Begin collecting ads from newspapers and magazines. Plan to collect twenty ads for your use by class hour 5 (See exercises 5-9 and 5-10.)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3 Ch. 1:1,6,8 (Aug. 28): Complete exercises 1-3 and 1-4.
Figure 2 (selection from syllabus: course outline)
Chapter 5: "NONARGUMENTATIVE PERSUASION"
STUDENT OBJECTIVES
1. Identify nonargumentative persuasive devices within claims or arguments. 2. Identify several linguistic devices employed in the slanting of information: a) Euphemisms; b) Dysphemisms; c) Innuendo; d) Loaded Questions; e) Weaslers, f) Downplayers; g) Proof Surrogates; h) Stereotypes; i) Hyperbole; J) Persuasive Definitions, Persuasive Explanations, and Persuasive Comparisons. 3. Apply critical listening and watching skills to electronic media news reports. *{4. Explain ways in which one's beliefs, attitudes and behavior are dependent upon the information one receives; and, ways one's attitudes and beliefs affect the information one
receives.} 5. Analyze nonargumentative persuasive devices. 6. Assess additional sources of information in responding to advertising claims.
Class
Hour Objectives
4 Ch.5: 1,2 (Aug. 30): Read pp. 116-128. Complete exercises 5-1, 5-3, and 5-4.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5 Ch.5: 3, (Sep. 4): Read pp. 132-142. Complete 4, 5, 6 exercises 5-6 or 5-7 or 5-8. Complete exercises 5-9 and 5-10.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6 Ch.6: (Sep. 6): Read pp. 146-164. Complete exercises 1, 2, 3 6-1 and 6-5. Begin work on exercise 6-13. Exercise 6-13 is a graded essay and is due at the beginning of class on class hour #8. Plan to write at least one page for this essay. (See also Essay Guidelines in this syllabus.)
Chapter 6: "PSEUDOREASONING I"
STUDENT OBJECTIVES
1. Identify "pseudoreasoning" techniques such as: a. Subjectivist fallacy; b. Appeal to belief; c. Appeal to consequences of belief; d. Scare tactics; e. Appeal to pity; f. Peer pressure: (1) Bandwagon (2) Appeal to loyalty; g. Apple polishing: (1) Appeal to vanity; h. Horse laugh; i. Appeal to spite or indignation; j. Two wrongs make a right: (1) Appeal to common practice; 2. Analyze pseudoreasoning techniques and their effects. 3. Apply knowledge of pseudoreasoning techniques to specific examples or passages by: a. Stating the main issue; b. Identifying the feeling or sentiment evoked; c. Stating whether the feeling or sentiment is relevant to the main issue; d. Explaining particular types of pseudoreasoning used;
e. Determining the credibility of claim(s) based on the above (a thru d) analysis.
Class
Hour Objectives
7 Ch.6: (Sept. 9): Complete the starred items and one 1, 2, 3 unstarred item (your choice) in exercises 6-11 and 6-12. Do the starred items first.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
8 Ch.6: (Sept. 11): Note: The essay on exercise 6-13 1, 2, 3 is due at the beginning of class today.
(See also Essay Guidelines in this Syllabus.) Read pp. 177-190. Complete exercises 7-1 and 7-2.
Chapter 7: "PSEUDOREASONING II"
STUDENT OBJECTIVES
1. Cite in examples pseudoreasoning patterns such as: a. Ad hominem fallacy: (1) Personal attack, (2) Circumstantial ad hominem, (3) Pseudorefutation, (4) Genetic fallacy; b. Selfish rationalizing; c. Burden of proof fallacy; d. Straw man fallacy; e. False dilemma; f. Slippery slope fallacy. . . .
Figure 3 (part of an exam)
Section #2 (10 points) (Ch1 #8) Answer any three (your choice).
Identify the main issue in the following passages.
EXAMPLE: Preston didn't come to class today. That fact makes it clear that he does not deserve to pass this course.
ANSWER: The issue is whether Preston deserves to pass this course.
1. "NORTH FOR PRESIDENT. HE'S GOT THE GUTS IT TAKES."-Bumper sticker
2. Letter to the editor: "They're at it again! Fall has arrived and it's time for the rice farmers to start polluting the air with smoke from the burning fields. This summer saw the worst forest fires in history and the smoke was nothing compared to what we get every fall day, courtesy of the friendly rice farmer. Yes, we know, the alternatives to burning are too expensive, but Mr. Rice Farmer shouldn't your own conscience tell you to get out of a business that requires you to poison the air we breathe? Do you really have the right to make bucks at the expense of so many people?"-Tehema County Tribune
3. "Turkeys may be the most popular holiday bird, but they are definitely not the smartest. Young turkeys aren't allowed outside of the brooding house because they will peer into the sky if it begins to rain. While admiring their first rainstorm the young turkeys drown."-Homeowners (real estate newsletter)
4. "The defeat of Judge [Robert] Bork's confirmation [to the Supreme Court] was healthy for our judicial system because it focused attention on the process of constitutional interpretation and the need for social consensus upon which the legitimacy of law so vitally depends. It was also a reminder that the process of seating a justice on the Supreme Court is an explicitly political one in which the legislative and the executive branches of government can and should play co-equal parts."-John B. Oakley, Sacramento Bee
Figure 4 (part of an exam)
Section #3 (10 points) (Ch5, #1,#2) Answer any three (your choice).
Identify and explain the use of any slanting devices you find in the following selections. If any of the slanter labels below apply, say so in your answer. Slanter Labels: a. Euphemism; b. Dysphemism; c. Innuendo; d. Loaded Question; e. Weasler; f. Downplayer; g. Proof surrogate; h. Stereotype; i. Hyperbole; j. Persuasive definition; k. Persuasive explanation; l. Persuasive comparison.
1. "During World War II, the United States government resettled many people of Japanese ancestry in internment camps."
2. "Although it has always had a bad name in the United States, socialism is nothing more or less than democracy in the realm of economics."
3. "Even though its detractors like to paint pictures of robber barons exploiting the workers, capitalism is nothing but individual freedom in the realm of economics."
4. "Since they preside over the buying and selling of about half the world's oil, the independent traders who make up the spot market control the prices of oil like absolute monarchs of the sixteenth century."
Figure 5 (part of an exam)
Section #4 (10 points) (Ch6 #1, #2, #3) Answer any three (your choice).
Identify any instances of pseudoreasoning that occur in the following passages by explaining in one or two sentences why the pseudoreasons are irrelevant to the point at issue. If any of the pseudoreasoning labels below apply, say so in your answer.
Pseudoreasoning Labels: a. Subjectivist fallacy; b. Appeal to belief; c. Appeal to the consequences of belief; d. Scare tactics; e. Appeal to pity; f. Peer pressure: (1) Bandwagon; (2) Appeal to loyalty; g. Apple polishing or appeal to vanity; h. Horse laugh; i. Appeal to spite or indignation; j. Two wrongs make a right; k. Common practice.
1. Overheard: "Hmmmm. Nice day. Think I'll go catch some rays." "Says here in this magazine that doing that sort of thing is guaranteed to get you a case of skin cancer." "Yeah, I've heard that, too. I think it's a bunch of baloney, personally. If that were true you wouldn't even be able to just plain lay out! Ugh!"
2. "Hey! Don't pick up that toad-they cause warts! Everyone knows that!"
3. RALPH: He may have done it, but I don't hold him responsible I'm a determinist, you know.
SHARON: What's that?
RALPH: A determinist? Someone who doesn't believe in free will. There's no free will.
SHARON: Oh. Well, I disagree.
RALPH: Why's that?
SHARON: Because. Maybe that's your view, but it's not mine. WINIFRED: Hey, read this! It says they can actually teach gorillas sign language!
ELDRIDGE: Uh huh, sure. And next they'll make them presidents of universities.
Figure 6 (selection from syllabus: grading standards & essay guidelines)
(1) Weights of graded items: Graded exercises (homework), 20%; Essays, 30%; First exam, 5%; Second exam, 10%; Third exam, 10%; Post exam 5%; Comprehensive final exam, 20%.
(2) Any assignment that is not turned in on time (i.e. at the beginning of the class period on which it is due) and for which your instructor has not agreed in advance to a late submission, gets a score of zero.
(3) The University standard scoring scale is as follows:
A 92 - 100; B 83 - 91; C 73 - 82; D 64 - 72; F below 64.
(4) Your instructor will provide you with a written description of grading standards for essays and other writing assignments (exercises, exams) or use the following description:
A correct and complete answer gets an "A"; one that otherwise meets the standard for an "A" but that has minor mistakes and/or blemishes of expression gets a "B"; one that does an adequate basic job and misses no more than one important point gets a "C"; one with serious omissions or errors, but that does express some important points gets a "D"; and, anything below that gets an "F". Standard English usage is considered in assigning grades.
C. Exams - At least 50% of all test items will be exercises taken directly from the Moore and Parker text, and all test items will be derived from the objectives stated in this syllabus. Each test question will specifically identify the objective being tested. Hence, the best preparation for the exams is to write responses to the objectives as a study guide, and to complete as many exercises as you can beyond the ones that are assigned.
D. Essay Resources: Some of the essay assignments require that you find resource material and all of the essay assignments can involve the use of such references. Unless otherwise approved by your instructor in advance you may use only resources published on or after thirty days prior to the first day of class in this course.
E. Essay Guidelines: Each essay must be typed or written clearly in blue or black ink on white paper. Requirements for each of the essay assignments in the course are listed below. (Your instructor may add to or modify these lists; if so, your instructor will identify the Syllabus objective(s) to be achieved by each item or change.) The requirements are different for each essay. These requirements are stated in the form of questions. To meet the requirements you should be able to answer "yes" to each question in checking your essay. Your instructor will use these lists and the grading standards to determine your grade for each essay. [Syllabus
objectives and/or Syllabus requirements are provided within the brackets following each question.]
(1) Chapter 6:
(a) Is the essay typed or written clearly in blue or black ink on white paper? [as specified by the assignment]
(b) Is the source attached? [as specified by the assignment]
(c) Is the source dated as required by syllabus paragraph IV D?
(d) Does the source advocate a conclusion; not make a report, etc.? [as specified by the assignment]
(e) Does the essay state the issue? [ch 1, #8]
(f) Does the essay state the side of the issue (the conclusion) that is advocated by the source? [ch 6, #3]
(g) Does the essay state a mistake in reasoning (pseudoreasoning) that is made in the source? [ch 6, #1]
(h) Does the essay explain why the source does not really support its conclusion, i.e., does the essay explain the mistake in reasoning (pseudoreasoning) made by the source? [ch 6, #2]
(i) Does the essay either describe another conclusion supported by the source, or state that no other conclusion is supported by the source? [ch 6, #2]
Figure 7 (selection from syllabus: essay guidelines)
(2) Chapter 4:
(a) Is the essay typed or written clearly in blue or black ink on white paper? [as specified by the assignment]
(b) Is the source attached? [as specified by the assignment]
(c) Is the source dated as required by syllabus paragraph IV D? [paragraph IV D]
(d) Does the source present an explanation? [ch 4, #3]
(e) Does the essay state the phenomenon explained in the source? [ch 4, #5]
(f) Does the essay describe the explanation given in the source? [ch 4, #3]
(g) Does the essay evaluate the explanation given in the source based on each of the criteria listed in the syllabus, objective 2, Chapter 4? [ch 4, #2]
(h) Does the essay either compare alternative explanations, or state that only one explanation is given in the source? [ch 4, #2]
(3) Chapter 8:
(a) Is the essay typed or written clearly in blue or black ink on white paper? [as specified by the assignment]
(b) Is the first sentence (the essay's conclusion) stated correctly (as given in the assignment)? [as specified by the assignment]
(c) Does the essay correctly state the conclusion of the argument from exercise 8-17? [ch 8, #2]
(d) Does the essay evaluate the truth of the premises of the argument from exercise 8-17? [ch 8, #8]
(e) Does the essay evaluate the support the premises of the argument from exercise 8-17 give to the conclusion of the argument from exercise 8-17? [ch 8, #8]
(f) Does the essay's argument support its conclusion (as stated in the first sentence)? [ch 8, #11]
Note: Repeat steps (a) thru (f) for a second unstarred item, as required by the assignment.
(4) Chapter 12:
(a) Is the essay typed or written clearly in blue or black ink on white paper? [as specified by the assignment]
(b) Is the first sentence the conclusion? [as specified by the assignment]
(c) Is the conclusion a moral prescriptive claim? [as specified by the assignment and ch 12, #1, #3]
(d) Are the premises either probably true or true beyond a reasonable doubt? [ch 8, #8]
(e) Is there at least one general moral prescriptive premise in the argument? [ch 12, #1, #3]
(f) Is/are the moral prescriptive premise(s) supportable on the basis of moral reasoning? (This means you must use moral reasoning in this essay. Mystical, spiritual, or religious claims; or claims about "higher powers"; or claims about the political, moral, or legal beliefs or standards of any group, culture, or society; or claims about how you or someone "feels" are descriptive claims about a source and do not meet the reasoning requirements of this assignment. Such issues will be addressed in class discussion. But the basic idea is that once you give reasons (not descriptive claims about a source) to support, for example, a claim like "Lying is wrong" in a particular situation, then you are engaging in moral reasoning. And moral reasoning is what this assignment, and this part of the course, are about.) [ch 12, #1, #4, #5, #8, #9]
(g) Do the premises support the conclusion? [ch 8, #11, ch 12, #9]
(h) Does the essay consider reasons that support at least one alternative to the essay's conclusion, and does the essay respond to these reasons?) [ch 12, #7, #9]
Dealing with Student Expectations in Practical Ethics Courses
Jim Gough
Red Deer College
Plato in the Republic describes a difficult and emotionally perilous journey made by a prisoner who ventures outside the confines of the cave into the reflection of divine sunlight. The prisoner leaves the passive, secure community of the cave for a journey to a new, unknown reality. The journey is both dramatic and intimidating as the prisoner moves from an accepted reality to one which is new and dramatically different from his starting point.
Less perilous but perhaps no less dramatic is the journey facing students in a practical ethics course. The student's complacent sense of security is tested as he embarks on his quest not knowing fully what route to take or what lies at the end of the journey. Like the prisoners in the cave, fear of the unknown and reticence at being forced to take a journey outside the security of his or her program (often these courses are required options) cause considerable concern and stress to students involved in these courses.
Practical ethics courses may typically involve someone trained in philosophy teaching a course in applied ethics involving examples, cases, problems or issues drawn from business, nursing, engineering or other career-directed programs. These courses often contain a minimum of theory enhanced by a set of case studies or problems designed to move the student quickly into discussion of the ethical issues in the career program. The application of selected theories is used to provide the foundational base for resolutions to the conflicts represented in the case studies.
With this kind of course design, the instructor's main task is to free the student to approach problems and issues in a clear and methodical way. The initial step is to free the student from faulty expectations incurred in part because they often listen to other students about specific courses. Most important to many students is the grade that he/she can expect from a particular course. This can be especially prominent in the minds of career-oriented students who believe their main focus should be on courses they believe directly relate to their chosen career. They are often trained in their career programs to be more task-oriented than process-oriented, so they focus on outcomes and the one way to achieve the grade they need or want.
Philosophy courses which are required components in career-oriented programs represent a significant departure in content and methodology from the other career-oriented courses. Argumentation and rational confrontation with prevailing approaches or accepted theories supported in philosophy courses may not have their parallel in other courses. Students may either expect that the philosophy course is more difficult or easier than his or her other courses. Both not knowing which of these two obtains along with not knowing what specifics in approach and content to expect creates a certain understandable anxiety. I have developed several ways of dealing with this anxiety, with the belief that if this anxiety can be even partly overcome, the journey will become easier. Through some experience I have discovered that once these anxieties have been dissipated and faulty expectations overturned, substantial progress can be made in a philosophy course dealing with both theoretical and practical issues, involving novice practitioners.
First, I begin by pointing out that there is a difference between a grade and an evaluation. I point out that an evaluation of their work represents a process which takes account of a number of factors which I outline on an Evaluation Guidelines sheet (see: Appendix I) attached to the course syllabus and later filled out and attached to each returned assignment. The purpose of these Evaluation Guidelines is (I) to provide the student with a list of very specific components I will be evaluating in each answer, grouped into two general categories of structure and content, (ii) to provide the student with consistent feedback over all the written assignments submitted for the course so that s/he can determine whether s/he is consistently weak in some categories or has improved over the first assignment in some or all categories, in order to monitor his or her own progress through the course material and assignments, (iii) to provide the student with some accountability from the instructor on the evaluation he or she receives, especially since the last category of specific comments allows for detailed discussion keyed to specific parts of the student's text. Finally, the determination of the grade is based on the Evaluation Guidelines so that if the student sees on the feedback that he/she is weak in the areas of structure, like coherency, the clarity or precision of a expression, excessive repetition or weak statement of a position, then this should cause them to change direction in future assignments or ask the instructor to clarify these specific comments. It should also help them to understand why they received the evaluation they received. These guidelines help the student to orient her efforts on the journey through the course by providing a map to guide the student in appropriate directions.
Often in courses that deal with values, such as practical ethics courses, students expect that they will be rewarded with high grades simply for giving voice to their (deeply felt) opinions or beliefs. I try to dispel this faulty expectation by stating in the first class that their personal opinions are worth nothing in this course. Usually, the effect of this statement is stunned silence, followed by puzzled looks as students consider that I don't really mean it. But it always has a profound and dramatic effect which produces lively and animated discussion in the very first class meeting. Invariably one student will begin the discussion with a response like "I thought I had the right to express my opinion." To which I reply, "Of course you do, and the rest of us have the right to ignore it." Students begin to realize that the value of an opinion lies in the support provided for it, not in the voicing of it. I guide the discussion to the point where we consider that the authority for a position or view cannot be based solely on the authority of the person who voices it. So, at least in some minds (but by no means all), a shift in attitude has begun to take shape at the point at which the journey through the course has begun. We move on to discuss various kinds of acceptable and unacceptable support for opinions.
The effect of the "opinion debate" is to cause students to see (I) how the approach and methodology of this course may differ from other courses, (ii) that the instructor is willing to consider a variety of opinions and yet value only those for which the student is willing to provide support, (iii) that informed discussion is the primary basis for making decisions. At the same time, we have debated an issue close to their hearts in the very first class and they have seen the instructor's attitude towards open and informed debate. Some anxiety about the instructor as their guide for the journey has dissipated and before their expectations rule their determination of the course, the journey has begun.
A third kind of faulty expectation students often bring to a course in practical ethics is that the course will provide them with the opportunity to reinforce their prevailing beliefs or attitudes. Sure, they accept the idea that they must support their beliefs but not that they may need to change or abandon some or all of them as a result of their own self-evaluation of them, or the considered evaluation provided by others.
It is not my expectation that this course should cause students to abandon previous beliefs or attitudes. Rather, I expect students to evaluate their own beliefs with the same vigor they evaluate the beliefs of others. But sometimes students are not aware of what beliefs they hold, what warrant they have for any or all of these beliefs and how one belief they hold is connected to others in such a way that altering one could alter the whole system of beliefs. The awareness of their beliefs and the structure that encases them is not something that can be accomplished in one class or even one course. It is my experience that students need to know what beliefs they hold and how these are connected to other beliefs in order to understand why they are strongly emotionally effected one way or the other by particular issues or problems and not others.
To facilitate this part of the journey through my course, I ask students to fill out an Attitude Inventory (see Appendix II) answering various questions which deal with their general attitudes. They keep this survey. It is not evaluated or even submitted. They are asked to continually refer back to it as they progress through the course to determine whether their beliefs have changed and why they have changed or not changed. Students often find this exercise useful and we discuss what has happened to some of their beliefs during the journey through the course in their evaluation of the course at the end of the term.
There are some obvious problems with this survey. First, the approach to a system of beliefs is based on W.v.O. Quine's pragmatic/coherence model of beliefs illuminated through the well-known "force-field" analogy (which itself is not subjected to critical scrutiny). Second, sometimes the exercise is emotionally upsetting to students who find it threatening to their notion of who they are and who they have always intended to be.
As a result of these problems, I remain open to changing the survey in favor of a better device (which I have yet to discover). The problem remains that sometimes the failure of students to realize how the attitudes and beliefs they hold at the beginning of a practical ethics course can hinder their ability to impartially consider all aspects of possible solutions to problems. The first step towards possible detachment from faulty beliefs is the realization of what these beliefs are and how they are connected to other beliefs in a system or structure used to approach new issues.
The fourth faulty expectation students often bring to this course has to do with the textual material they are required to read, comprehend and ultimately evaluate. Often students expect that the text material will be straight forward, easily accessible and written in a language that they can fully comprehend in one brief reading. Sometimes they expect that the issues will be presented in such a way that the solution will be obvious and uncomplicated by qualifiers and provisos. They are ill-prepared for articles filled with technical language, theoretical terms and cumbersome definitions which seem to split every conceivable hair, leaving the student more baffled than informed. Sometimes the issue or problem is constantly being re-defined leaving the student puzzled over the "actual" problem, especially since there is not one start to the explanation of the problem but several before any attention is even given to possible solutions. I do not recommend or use texts which contain a lot of predigested summary of articles or case studies. For I do not believe that students will be presented with predigested material in their everyday lives or in their career practices. They will have to face the onerous task of sorting through various versions of the issue written in different technical languages along with possible solutions to it.
To facilitate the student's journey through the text, I provide a set of Reading and Assessment Guidelines (see Appendix III) for students to use as they read through each article, problem or case study. These guidelines are intended to get the student to approach the text with the intention of finding various specific features in it. Any text can be read from many different perspectives and the guidelines do not preclude different readings of the same text. They do, however, guide the student to identify various structural and content components of the text. For example, the guidelines ask the student to identify: the main thesis or position developed, the principle, rule or action developed, assumptions about human nature, behavior or actions in the piece, the form of the argument in which any position is presented, and so on.
Most of the categories identified in the Reading and Assessment Guidelines are consistent with and can be found in the Evaluation Guidelines mentioned above so that the student begins to see a correspondence between what they are identifying and what they should be doing themselves on their own written assignments. In this way, they are able to identify, understand and evaluate strategies used in the articles or case studies that they can usefully employ in their own work. What is hoped for (but not always achieved) is an integration between what is read and what is written.
The lectures and classroom discussions are used to reinforce this integration. The Reading and Assessment Guidelines, by directing students to read for a purpose, has the desired effect of identifying specific problems students have with the written material. It avoids the persistent problem posed by students often phrased as "I don't know where to start" or "I don't know what you are looking for in these readings," since it tells students what in general to look for in the readings. Finally the Reading and Assessment Guidelines, if followed studiously, provide the student with the outline for an inclusive and thorough set of notes in the course. Lectures and discussions in the class are oriented to these reading guidelines as we move through each article or case study.
The fifth faulty expectation some students begin with in a practical ethics course is that their performance in the course is to be compared to that of the instructor. So, to do well in the course they must be as good as the instructor in the skills and knowledge of the course. Obviously, this makes some degree of failure a foregone conclusion. At the thought of this expectation, anxiety and stress levels increase among students, especially students who have and continue to perform well in other courses. I point out to students that they are all to be compared to each other using the Evaluation Guidelines. Any distribution of student grades is based on actual performance of students in the class, so that the highest or best performance in the class is used as a guide to determine the rest of the distribution and not some artificial standard established prior to the class or outside the domain of these guidelines. Students in the course tell me what they are capable of, I don't tell them in advance of evaluating their work. Sometimes my expectations of what students are capable of are faulty as I expect too little or too much. But rarely is it the case that all students will fall below my expectations. More often some significant number of them will continue to exceed my expectations and in so doing lead the rest of the class.
Further, I point out to anxious students that my expectations are not about an end product but about a process which in many respects varies from individual to individual. This is the point about the use of the evaluation guidelines in determining progress of a student through the journey of the course. Skills change and develop. This can be monitored in classroom performance and on written assignments using the evaluation guidelines as a key to identifying progress. Students can compare the written evaluations I provide on their work to the comments I make on the work of other students. I encourage this activity. The weaker students can see the degree to which the better students performed on certain tasks and that, even so, the better students' assignments were not perfect. The process of achieving a better evaluation and grade is not so onerous as they had initially believed.
With all the approaches and devices I outlined above, it is to be expected that some who use these approaches may be accused of "spoon-feeding" students. There are several responses to this kind of objection.
First, nothing that I do in my classes foretells to the students the only possible solution to any problem or issue. Second, my students display as much if not more philosophical rigor than many other philosophy students primarily because they are immersed in the practices of the discipline at their own level sooner in the course.
Anyone teaching a practical ethics course needs to pay careful attention to the audience for the course and spend some time preparing the groundwork and the devices which will best facilitate the journey of this audience through the material of the course. The devices I use are subject to continual evaluation by me and the students but it is desirable that a wider audience consider these devices to determine whether they are appropriate and serve the function for which they were designed.
Appendix I Evaluation Guidelines
(Considerably more space is left for student comments than is indicated on these pages.)
General Features of Your Answer
(E1) Overall Organization
(a) statement of your position: [ ] (I) good [ ] (ii) adequate [ ] (iii) poor [ ](iv) no statement of position
(b) coherent structure: [ ] (I) good [ ] (ii) adequate [ ] (iii) poor
(c) repetition/padding: [ ] (I) none [ ]( ii) some [ ] (iii) too much
(E2) Clarity/precision of expression: [ ] (I) good [ ] (ii) adequate [ ] (iii) needs improvement
(E3) Evidence of (attempts at) originality/creativity: [ ] (I) good [ ] (ii) adequate [ ] (iii) none
Specific Components of Your Answer
(E4) Exposition/information: [ ] (I) in-depth [ ] (ii) adequate [ ] (iii) inadequate/inaccurate [ ] (iv) too much exposition [ ] (v) too little exposition
(E5) Relation of exposition to argumentation: [ ] (I) good [ ] (ii) satisfactory [ ] (iii) needs improvement
(E6) Overall argumentation: [ ] (I) good [ ] (ii) adequate [ ] (iii) needs improvement
(E7) Support for conclusion: [ ] (I) good [ ] (ii) adequate [ ] (iii) needs improvement
(E8) Use of examples or counter-examples to support your position: [ ] (I) good [ ] (ii) adequate [ ] (iii) poor
(E9) Use of relevant material from the text (quotes, page references, paraphrase, summary): [ ] (I) good [ ] (ii) adequate [ ] (iii) poor
(E10) Consideration of possible objections: [ ] (I) good [ ] (ii) adequate [ ] (iii) poor
(E11) The extent to which your answer deals with important/
central features of the issue raised in the question: [ ] (I) good [ ] (ii) adequate [ ] (iii) poor
(E12) Specific comments:
(E13) Overall Assessment/Grade:
Appendix II Attitude Inventory
Check one box for each of the following questions. The purpose of this inventory is to provide you with some useful information on your attitudes coming into this course. What is of interest is your honest reaction to each question, not how you think you should answer each question. If you wish to provide a brief explanation for your choice, then write it into the Comments section at the end of each question.
1. To what extent do you find it upsetting, unsettling or troubling to have your views critically challenged and ultimately put into serious doubt?
[ ] a. a lot [ ] b. somewhat [ ] c. not at all
Comments:
2. To what extent do you believe it is crucial to the assessment of anyone's argument or position that you first assume or discover their inclination/motivation (or your own) for holding the view they (or you) do hold?
[ ] a. a lot [ ] b. somewhat [ ] c. not at all
Comments:
3. To what extent is it very important to know the background of the individual who promotes a particular argument or position?
[ ] a. a lot [ ] b. somewhat [ ] c. not at all
Comments:
4. Do you see any difference between devising an argument to defend a position you already hold and devising an argument to create the conditions for the position you should hold.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. sometimes but not always
Comments:
5. It is important that the view you hold on any ethical issue be consistent with the view you hold with reference to belief in God.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. sometimes but not always
Comments:
6. It is important that the view you hold on any ethical issue be consistent with the view taken by experts in the social sciences like: sociology, psychology or anthropology.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. sometimes it is important
Comments:
7. Do you believe it is impossible to separate an individual's political/ideological beliefs from his/her arguments in ethics?
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. sometimes it is important
Comments:
8. The best way to determine an answer to any question is to unambiguously appeal to facts. Since there are no facts in ethics, there are no answers in ethics.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. sometimes this is true
Comments:
9. In ethics there are no right or wrong answers, so you are free to believe anything you want to believe and so is anyone else.
[ ]a. yes [ ]b. no [ ] c. this is true of some approaches but not all
Comments:
10. An answer to any dispute in ethics must resolve the dispute once and for all to the satisfaction of all parties to the dispute.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. sometimes this is possible
Comments:
11. Since it is necessary to show tolerance for all points of view, do you believe that each moral position should be granted equal weight and equal acceptability?
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. there are a few exceptions
Comments:
12. Although it is possible for individuals to discuss moral issues, ultimately all moral issues should be resolved by an appropriate moral authority either from the political or the moral realm.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. some issues but not all
Comments:
13. It is important to know what group an individual comes from before evaluating his/her argument because we know that individuals within a group tend to think alike.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. sometimes
Comments:
14. The force or persuasiveness of an argument in ethics depends not so much on what is said but on who says it.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. sometimes this is true
Comments:
15. In a democracy, any act which is legal is morally acceptable, although this may not be true in a dictatorship.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. sometimes this is true
Comments:
16. In an age of technological advances in every area, the experts in the technology are in the best position to assess its ethical implications.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. sometimes this is true
Comments:
17. In an age of technological advances in every area, the experts who devise and use this technology can not be trusted to assess its ethical implications.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. sometimes they can be trusted
Comments:
18. Any discipline, like practical ethics, without a firmly established set of doctrines for itself cannot criticize any other discipline like any of the social sciences or religion which has an established doctrine.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. depends on the other discipline
Comments:
19. Do you believe there is a liberalizing trend in ethics today which puts anyone who holds a more conservative, traditional view at a great disadvantage.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. to a certain extent this is true
Comments:
20. Do you believe there is a return to a conservative trend in ethics today, which puts anyone who holds a more liberal view at a great disadvantage?
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. to a certain extent this is true
Comments:
21. All arguments in ethics are a matter of clever word play and none of them have any substantive content which could effectively contribute to the resolution of any moral issue.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. to some extent this is true
Comments:
22. Since individuals are determined to act by factors beyond their control, ethics can have no practical effects on the actual behaviour of anyone.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. sometimes we can change
Comments:
23. The test of whether an ethical belief is true or false is whether or not a majority of people believe it is true or not.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. depends on how much of a majority
Comments:
24. Do you believe it is most important to be comfortable with your moral beliefs, so if you feel right about your moral beliefs they are right for you.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. true of some moral beliefs but not all
Comments:
25. It is obvious that individuals are by nature self-interested egoists and totally selfish, so it makes no sense to argue about or devise any moral principles, rules or guidelines since they will be broken anyway.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. true of most individuals
Comments:
26. Do you believe that most individuals are basically good, and if shown by proper example what to do they will do it. For those deviants who do not follow the example set, little can be done and argumentation is useless.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. depends on the individual's upbringing
Comments:
27. Do you believe it is not only inappropriate but also wrong for anyone to make a moral judgement about the behaviour of anyone else; we are each free to devise our own morality and only God can judge which view is ultimately correct, not you.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. depends on whether you believe in God
Comments:
28. It takes a certain kind of individual, one disposed to being argumentative, to do well in a practical ethics course. If you are not this kind of individual but rather someone who needs resolution and determination in their lives, you will not do well in a practical ethics course.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. true in most cases
Comments:
29. Since philosophers and others from the beginning of time have been unable to resolve some of the more persistent moral problems (there have always been wars, for example, and there always will be) I see no reason to believe that I could contribute anything to the possible resolution of any of them.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. true in most cases
Comments:
30. The teacher in a practical ethics course should make his or her views/positions on all of the issues in the course public. It is unfair to keep the students in the dark.
[ ] a. yes [ ] b. no [ ] c. some of his/her views, but not all
Comments:
Appendix III Reading and Assessment Guidelines (The form leaves considerably more space for responses than indicated on this page.)
Article: (p. )
1. Main thesis/position developed by the author of the passage:
1a. Theory/Principle/Rule/Action developed:
1b. Assumption(s) about human nature/behavior/action(s):
2. Opposing thesis outlined:
3. Argument pattern/form-Basic Argument:
4. Brief evaluation of the main thesis and/or the opposing thesis:
5. Possible alternate support of the main thesis/or the opposing thesis:
5a. Counter example(s):
5b. Logical difficulties:
5c. Problematic assumption(s):
5d. Implementation (practical) concerns:
Overall Assessment:
6. Preferred Position (your position):
6a. Thesis
6b. Theory/Principle/Rule/Action supported:
6c. Assumption(s) about human nature/behavior/action(s):
6d. Supporting Reasons for the Preferred Position:
6e. Consideration of possible objections to the Preferred Position:
Using Group Projects in Business Ethics Courses
Vance G. Morgan
Providence College
I. INTRODUCTION
As a former member of a small philosophy department that is a "service" department to other majors at a small private university that emphasizes business and engineering, my teaching duties over the past three years have included three sections of Business Ethics per semester. Business Ethics is a requirement for all business majors. Over ninety percent of the students taking the course are junior or senior business majors fulfilling one of the last requirements for their degree.
One of the most successful aspects of my business ethics courses has been the frequent use of group projects. I have found group projects to be particularly important in business ethics courses for two reasons. First, nothing helps dispel the notion that ethics and business are mutually exclusive better than to immerse students in exercises designed to illustrate that ethical problem-solving is an interactive process requiring the creativity, imagination and energy of all involved, and not simply an application of inflexible abstract absolutes having little to do with real life.
Second, the experience of addressing issues and solving problems collectively, as well as being held collectively responsible for a finished product, is particularly appropriate in business ethics courses, since such activities are part and parcel of the business environment. One student told me that the notion of corporate responsibility did not make a lot of sense to her until she saw it in action on a regular basis in her group.
II. NUTS AND BOLTS
Early each semester, I form groups of four or five students that meet four times during the semester to discuss, analyze, and ultimately submit a written report on an assigned case or article. Hence, each group participates in four group projects in a given semester. All group project assignments are included in a packet of materials provided to the students at the beginning of the semester (see Appendix A). One hour of class time is set aside for groups to discuss each assigned project and formulate answers to the detailed questions that accompany each project. No group meetings outside of class are required, since projects are such that a group whose members have considered the case and accompanying questions before the class meeting can discuss the questions together and complete all work other than writing up the report within one hour. A written report is due in class one week after group work. All members of the group share the grade for the report; the average of all four group projects counts for 25% of a student's final grade. Over the past three years, I have taught seventeen sections of business ethics in which I have collected over three hundred group projects. This experience has helped me, often by trial and error, to "fine-tune" the process and sharpen its effectiveness considerably. Some of the more important lessons I have learned are as follows:
A. How to teach ethical theory
I have found that the success of the group projects in business ethics courses depends to a large extent on how standard ethical theories are presented at the outset. It is important for students not to get the impression that the Greatest Happiness Principle or the Categorical Imperative are abstract, inflexible principles that "real life" must in some way conform to in some Procrustean fashion. This impression is difficult to counteract, because it is part of our cultural heritage to view morality as a matter of absolute and inviolable principles. If ethical theories are presented in this fashion, however, applying ethics becomes little more than speculating about "What would an act utilitarian say?" or "What would a deontologist say?"
Rather students are encouraged to envision moral rules as (what Mark Johnson calls) "useful rules of thumb that summarize the collective experience and wisdom of a moral tradition concerning prototypical situations."1 In other words, moral rules count as a starting point, but their role is not to "tell us the right thing to do." This alternative conception of moral rules fosters creativity and imagination in addressing moral problems, rather than rigidity and frustration.2
B. Choosing projects
The case studies found in standard business ethics texts are not generally well-suited to group project assignments. They are usually either brief "thought provokers" that provide too little information or are too lengthy and detailed to be useful in the hour frame my classes require. Better sources are current events-this past semester, a lead article on whistle blowing from The Wall Street Journal, followed by detailed questions, for example, served the purpose well in one instance. I have also found cases from the Harvard Business Review (minus the commentaries) to be challenging and about the right length. Projects should be of the length and detail that will produce a 4-5 page report. (I have made it a self-imposed rule not to use any project for more than two consecutive semesters. This guarantees fresh thinking on my part and current topics for the groups to address.)
C. Forming groups
Students are assigned to groups in the following manner. I wait until the first two weeks of the semester have passed before forming groups. This allows me to identify the most active participants in general discussions; I "seed" each group with at least one of these. Groups should be as diverse as possible, in terms of age, gender, and race. I experimented last semester with allowing persons to request to be together in groups, but found the report quality of such groups tended to be lower than those formed randomly.
D. Monitoring groups
Groups are entirely self-monitoring. Each group is free to organize itself as it sees fit. Some choose to rotate the position of "project leader" during the semester. Some groups have elected to assign specific questions to individuals beforehand, who report on their answers when the group meets in class. It is the responsibility of those group members who miss the in-class session to contact their group outside of class to obtain missed information. All projects must be signed by participating members before submission. Those who do not sign the project do not get credit.
The inevitable conflicts among members concerning distribution of work, those "not carrying their weight," or proper satisfaction of requirements are settled internally. I am available as a last resort to "referee," but only if approached by the group as a whole. Only twice in over three hundred projects have I been approached by members of a group concerning an individual not bearing his or her fair share of the burden. (An appointment was made each time for the whole group to meet with me; in both cases, the difficulty was settled by the group prior to the meeting.)
E. Grading projects
Projects are graded in four major categories: Completeness, Copy-editing, Identification of moral issues and relevant factors, and Application of relevant concepts and methods. The evaluation form I have designed (see Appendix B) provides for both objective numerical evaluation and more substantive comments. Students have indicated that they appreciate the numerical evaluation system, in that it provides full disclosure of the grading process as well as emphasizing that there is an important objective aspect to moral thinking.
III. CONCLUSION
On middle- and end-of-semester evaluations, students most often list the group projects as the most valuable aspect of the course. They mention the importance of hearing diverse points of view expressed by persons who might never participate in the larger class setting. Many have formed connections and friendships that have lasted long after the course ended. Perhaps most important, they learn that ethics is a natural activity, requiring all the vastly diverse resources available to the human being.
Using group projects serves clearly to remind me of my proper role as a teacher. My role is not primarily to impart information and is certainly not to tell students what to think. It is rather to get them to think, to facilitate the learning process that ultimately can only be energized from within the student. Group projects empower students to take control of their own learning process.
Endnotes
1. Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 187.
2. Robert Solomon, in "The One-Minute Moralist," suggests that ethics is best understood as "the art of mutually agreeable tentative compromise." Solomon, Entertaining Ideas (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992), 253. Moral thinking as it is actually practiced by real human beings is much closer to creative and artistic compromise than the application of inviolable principles.
APPENDIX A
SAMPLE GROUP PROJECT
Articles: "Is Big Blue Hostile To Gray Hairs?", Business Week, 10/21/1991
"IBM Loses Lawsuit Charging Age Bias Against Ex-Engineer," The Wall Street Journal, 11/5/1991
"IBM Is Guilty Of Age Discrimination," Business Week, 11/18/1991
Project Assignment:
Read the above articles, then answer the following questions:
1. Given the facts in the articles, do you believe that IBM's early-retirement plans are examples of age discrimination? Present a moral argument in favor of the position that such plans do discriminate on the basis of age, showing what rights and duties are in conflict and which take priority. Then provide a moral argument in favor of the position that such programs as IBM's do not discriminate on the basis of age, once again showing how right and duties must be balanced in order to morally support this conclusion. Which do you believe is the stronger argument?
2. When Rathemacher's new manager (Charles Quinn) told Rathemacher that he had been passed over for a promotion because Quinn wanted "new young blood in that job," was Quinn guilty of age discrimination? To what extent is it morally justifiable to limit the criteria according to which an employer can make promotion and hiring decisions? Is there any situation in which age might be a relevant factor in promotion and hiring decisions? If so, where does one morally draw the line between when age is a relevant factor and when it is not? Be specific.
3. What is your opinion of IBM's claim that it has never laid off workers for economic reasons? Do you think the Rathemacher case proves this claim false? Why or why not? Do you believe that Judge Thompson's suspicion that IBM's plan "may have had impermissible goals" and that it indicated "indirect proof of institutionalized age bias" is correct? If so, what were these impermissible goals? Suggest how IBM might revise its plan so that any goals involved would be permissible.
4. On what moral and/or legal basis do you believe the court awarded back pay but refused to award punitive damages? Do you believe that this decision was correct?
APPENDIX B
GROUP PROJECT EVALUATION FORM
Evaluation - Project #__, Group __
1. Completeness - How well did the finished product conform to the requirements of the assignment? Have all elements of the assignment been adequately addressed?
4 5 6 7 8 9 10 x1.5 = _____
2. Copy-editing - How well was the finished product proofread? Sentence form, spelling, punctuation, grammar, organization.
4 5 6 7 8 9 10 x1.5 = _____
3. Identification of moral issues and relevant factors: Did the finished product successfully isolate the moral issues (rights, duties, etc.) contained in the assignment? Were relevant factors such as context properly identified?
4 5 6 7 8 9 10 x3 = _____
4. Application of relevant concepts and methods to solve moral dilemmas and/or analyze case study/article - How well were ethical methods of evaluation applied? How well did the finished product incorporate concepts discussed in the text and in class?
4 5 6 7 8 9 10 x4 = _____
TOTAL = _____
COMMENTS:
Reviews
Frank E. Manuel. The Broken Staff: Judaism through Christian Eyes (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. 363).
Reviewed by August Viglione, Istituto Universitario Orientale, Naples.
This book presents us with a complex and perhaps overwhelming topic, namely how Christians viewed Judaism and the Jewish people over a very long period. Manuel is an historian of ideas and has written a very worthwhile book on eighteenth- century religion, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, which in some remote way helps us to see his interest in the Judeo- Christian polemic. However, the task in this present work is far more arduous. It is not only a question of the enormous time frame, it is one of definition of who is to represent the Christians and Jews on the historical stage. This fact presents us with two interesting pedagogical problems that can be encountered in a course in the history and philosophy of religion, for which this book is appropriate.
Manuel's book is polemical, that is, it takes a marked Jewish stand within a still ongoing Jewish-Christian dialogue. At times we are confronted with what appears to be a conflict between good Christian Hebraists and bad-with Frank Manuel severely reprimanding the bad ones. It is remarkable that he subtitles his book "Judaism through Christian Eyes," for he is not taking or attempting to take a Christian standpoint upon the religious and social controversies that have divided Christians and Jews. He is providing an instrument for correcting the ignorance he believes to infect the Christian side, which, in his view, has poisoned their dialogue. It provides students with a competent and yet "committed" presentation of a long and all too frequently sorrowful history, so that they may see that history is not always a "disinterested" presentation of the supposed facts of the case. It is also a scholarly effort to reevaluate and to make use of mankind's past, and requires students to evaluate and to take a position of their own upon that history.
Second, Manuel's book confronts-not always effectively, in my view-a great impediment to interfaith dialogue that often gives rise to polemics. Neither Christianity nor Judaism has presented us always with the same face. In their polemics, Christians and Jews may therefore be responding to, or attacking, some atypical form of their opponents' religion. A criticism made to appear as an attack upon the opposed religion as a whole may be appropriate, if at all, to that atypical form. This deep problem of assessing the fairness of such attacks, which addresses itself to all historians, recurs in many instances in this history. Students must therefore be given the habits of sympathetic reflection and critical acumen if they are not to lapse into caricature. This is precisely an important aim of education, and one to which intercultural studies of this sort may be a valuable contribution, if only because the tendency to misrepresent one's opponents in any dispute is so great.
There are some external criticisms that must be made of Manuel's history. What makes difficult an easy, joyful reading of this book is the lack of a bibliography (just endnotes indicating pages and titles of books cited), a subject index and a glossary of terms (a serious omission in a book of this nature). A further disconcerting aspect of this book is the frequent citing of books and even rabbinical texts without giving any examples from the works. This would have given readers the flavor of the Jewish-Christian dialogue in epochs far removed from our own. For example, on pages 77-78 he cites among many other works two popular 17th-century books about "prevailing practices and beliefs of Judaism in European society" by Rabbi Leone Modena (Historia de gli riti hebraici) and by Rabbi Simone Luzzatto (Discourso circa il stato de gl'hebrei) without even mentioning any particular statement from these books. Offering concrete examples drawn from these books might have made Manuel's book more palpable and less descriptive.
These are no doubt minor shortcomings. A more serious criticism concerns the issue which Manuel discusses, though not in depth, of how the Renaissance saw the rise of a great interest on the part of Christians in Hebraica in general. Renaissance Christians may, of course, have been attracted to Jewish studies by the obvious theological questions raised by the history and the fact of the survival of Judaism. Yet in my view, the growth of Christian interest in Judaism during this period may also have resulted from an interest in contemporary Jewry, that is, in the Jews living among them. The author seems to ignore the social history of the periods he discusses, choosing instead to analyze Jewish-Christian dialogue with reference to the surviving religious and theological texts alone. More research has to be done on key motivational issues.
Without a doubt, the related issue of separating evaluations of Judaism by Christians from their views on Jewry is a key issue in this book. And, despite his disinterest in the social aspects of this distinction, Frank Manuel does not neglect to distinguish appraisals of Judaism from appraisals of Jews. Over the centuries, from the inception of Christianity, Christians regarded Judaism in the peculiar light cast by their own beliefs, for Christianity has an ineradicable link with Judaism, whether Christianity is thought of positively as an offshoot of a radical Jewish sect or negatively as a refutation of the established rabbinical Judaism of the ancient world. Hence Christian attitudes have extended from seeing Jews as mere Christ- killers to seeing them as one of the most original and clairvoyant groups in adopting monotheism and paving the way for mankind's salvation. This ambivalence is discussed superbly by Manuel. Further, he demonstrates how this ambivalence was resolved, with disastrous consequences, by the coming of Deism, and Christian Deism in particular. The Deists removed Judaism from its pedestal as pioneer of mankind's salvation, and insisted that Judaism was not that different from other religions. With respect to the truths of Christianity, the Deists argued that the notion of a single God does not need Judaism as its unique source. The Enlightenment then introduced a "rational" religion which not only removed this crucial support for Judaism in Christian eyes, but also "insisted upon how superstitious, barbarous and even cruel the ancient Hebrews were."
The eighteenth century hence represents a watershed in the history of Christian-Jewish relations. To demonstrate the Enlightenment's effect upon the growth of anti-Semitism, Manuel cites many illustrious Judeophobes of the age, among them Voltaire, the Baron d'Holbach and his circle, the great historian Gibbon, and milder proto-anti-Semites such as Diderot. However, these individuals were even more critical of Christianity than they were of Judaism, and as critical of Christians as they were of Jews; it is in any case incorrect to call them Christians. Hence a discussion of their Judeophobia should be beyond the scope of this book, which purports to deal with Judaism in Christian eyes. Interestingly enough, toward the end of the eighteenth century several French monks, abbots and priests, all anti- Enlightenment figures, defended the greatness and importance of the Hebrews and the Bible. Such figures as the Abbés Guénée, Bergier, Gregoire vindicated "Israel," as professor Manuel puts it. In Manuel's opinion, their briefs for Judaism are the result of a combination of self- interest and broad-mindedness. These scholars came to see Judaism as an essential pillar in the Christian picture of God's salvational plan, without which all their efforts against the Deism and even the paganism of their opponents would be frustrated. The acceptance of the Jews as citizens is an Enlightenment accomplishment, but in France at least, some Catholic clergymen were in part responsible for the enhancement of the Jewish religion in the eyes of Christians.
The French Revolution brought together all the strains of thought on the Jewish question. The Jews are treated now as subjects of the King or as citizens of the state rather than as workers in a divine plan. And, for the first time, they are granted civil rights. Henceforth, we are confronted with another fundamental issue of this book, namely, the treatment of Jews rather than a theological and historical evaluation of Judaism, and with an explanation of the origins of anti- Semitism. Manuel attributes the latter to either a very secular reading of the Bible or to a depreciatory attitude toward contemporary Jews of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Manuel had identified Voltaire and some of the more vulgar anti- Jewish writers as the cause of the later anti- Semitism in France. This may be true, but it does seem extravagant. Clearly, with the coming of the post-Revolutionary secular age, it was possible to approve the abstract ideal of freedom of religion while suspecting and distrusting those persons who practice other religions than the mainstream ones. In any case, we are no longer viewing Judaism "through Christian eyes."
The last two chapters of the book-"The German Janus" and "The Aftermath of Liberation" are so dense with facts and assertions that they appear to represent another book with the implicit knowledge of the other nine chapters of the original book. In "The German Janus," Manuel at length discusses some highlights of works on the Hebrews and the exquisiteness of their poetry and literature and laws by such eminent figures as Michaelis, Herder, Hamann, Kant, and Fichte. Although all these figures accepted the greatness of the ancient Hebrews, with the possible exception of Fichte, they were all critical of contemporary Jewry. Manuel sees Voltaire in France and Kant and especially Fichte in Germany as the forerunners of modern anti- Semitism. To Fichte he dedicates these incensed words: "The age- old Christian theological arguments against Judaism were secularized- those who had been eternally damned were now incurably diseased" (p. 289). Luther's Christian condemnation of Jews lived on in the secular Fichte who quite nonchalantly suggested that the Jews were incurable and hence should be sent off to the Holy Land; they could never become good Germans. Despite the great contribution to Hebraic studies and to the role of the ancient Hebrews from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment by great German Hebraists, there is little doubt that there were many significant detractors of Judaism and Jews particularly in the German world from the Reformation onward.
Professor Manuel ends his book with a thoughtful discussion of the present-day relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Besides a lengthy d