APA Newsletters
Spring 2000
Volume 99, Number 2

Nussbaum’s view of the goal of teaching philosophy is widespread among philosophers. In this paper I offer a redescription of this goal, for two reasons: to preserve the connection between the content of the course (what Plato et al. said) and its goal, and to embed critical thinking skills in a broader, more inclusive goal.

I want to begin with an example of course content in philosophy. Philosophers, notoriously, doubt many things. Doubt, or skepticism, looms large in philosophers as diverse as Socrates, Descartes, Hume, Nietzsche, and James. There may be no model of doubt that fits all of them, for what single model would fit Socrates’s doubts about what the Oracle of Delphi said about him or about his fellow Athenians’ claims to wisdom about human virtue, Descartes’s hyperbolical doubts, and Hume’s doubts about the power of the human mind to answer ultimate questions? Yet doubt, in some guise, is something that we should want students to learn. They should learn when to doubt and when not to doubt; good and bad reasons for doubt; the difference between denying a thesis and merely criticizing an argument; the difference between Socratic doubt and Cartesian doubt. Amidst this variety there is a common thread students should grasp: doubt admits of extremes—doubting virtually everything, thus criticizing without understanding, and doubting virtually nothing, thus becoming credulous (or perhaps bored). Neither extreme appreciates the appropriate occasions for doubt. In short, I submit that doubt is an example of one of the intellectual virtues that students ought to learn.

There is, however, a problem with seeing this as our goal: we have no expertise in the intellectual virtues because there are no such experts. We rightly claim expertise of various sorts because we have studied the classical and contemporary texts, and the interpretations and criticisms that make teaching philosophy a matter of expertise. We can assign exam questions and paper topics, about which there are right and wrong, and better and worse, answers. But intellectual virtue is not a matter of expertise. For example, learning the appropriate occasions for doubt is not simply a matter of learning the arguments of philosophers and their interpreters, including teachers of philosophy courses. Are we, who have the expertise to teach Socratic doubt, Cartesian doubt, and so on, also experts on the virtue of doubt? It is at least doubtful that we are, if the virtue is not learned merely in learning the arguments and methods of philosophers.

If not, then there is a difference between course content, the topics and methods on which we have expertise, and the goal of the course, intellectual virtue, on which we lack expertise. Yet despite this difference, content and goal are inseparable. Consider, again, the virtue of doubt. This virtue is learned partly in learning what philosophers said; indeed, it can only be learned in learning about the doubts of philosophers (and other people). For there is no learning of the virtue of doubt that is not learning about somebody’s doubts about something. Doubt does not float free of its occasions, topics, and doubters. To see the point, we should examine how one acquires intellectual virtue, and I propose that we use Aristotle’s argument that moral virtue is not a techne, a skill or craft or art, about which one acquires expertise, though it is like one.

Analogously, intellectual virtue cannot be learned in the abstract, apart from its occasions. Generosity, as a state of character, is one goal of ethical education, but while it is different from generous actions, it is inseparable from them, because it cannot be learned otherwise. So for intellectual virtue: as a goal it is different from particular "products," such as a student’s doubting Euthyphro’s claims to expertise about piety, but is inseparable from them, because it cannot be learned otherwise. One learns the virtue of doubt by doubting, and by doubting particular claims of particular people.

If there is no set algorithm for teaching the intellectual virtues, how are we to go about inculcating these virtues in our students, which inculcation, I have argued, should be our goal in teaching philosophy? My answer is this: since the intellectual virtues are learned from especially outstanding examples and since some of best material on the virtues (and some of the worst vices) is to be found in the writings of philosophers—writings that we have studied and so are in a position to teach—we are well placed to pursue the goal of having our students learn the intellectual virtues. To illustrate, on determining relevance in a discussion, Hume tells the reader in his Dialogues that he is discussing natural religion, not revealed religion, so that what may be relevant to the latter may not be relevant to the former. On distinguishing between different sorts of questions and the appropriate answers, Socrates asks Euthyphro what piety is; Euthyphro replies that it is prosecuting wrongdoers, and Socrates tells him that is not the sort of answer he wanted. Aristotle distinguishes between the exactness appropriate to answers in demonstrative sciences like mathematics and that appropriate to persuasive arguments in ethics and rhetoric. On understanding assent and dissent in graduated, not absolute terms, Hume argues that assent and dissent depend on evidence, and less than conclusive evidence requires less than conclusive assent and dissent, to the point where a hypothesis may be a mere conjecture or guess. Various virtues, such as the ability to submit to criticism, intellectual honesty and the ability to recognize that one does not know, and intellectual courage and the ability to persevere in the face of opposition, are perhaps best exemplified in Socratic dialogues (even if—or perhaps because—Socrates’s interlocutors often failed to exhibit them).

Notes

1. Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

2. For similar understanding of the particular intellectual virtues, see Michael Oakeshott, "Learning and Teaching," in The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education, ed. Timothy Fuller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970); Israel Scheffler, "Moral Education and the Democratic Ideal," in his Reason and Teaching (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1989); Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); James Montmarquet, Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993).

3. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ii, 4, 1105a27–b5.

4. See Rosalind Hursthouse, "Normative Virtue Ethics," in How Should One Live: Essays on the Virtues, ed. Roger Crisp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 27.

5. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ii, 2, 11041–5; ii, 9, 1109b 20–23; and iv, 5, 1126b 2–4. See also John McDowell, "Virtue and Reason," in How Should One Live, ed. Crisp (note 3); and David Roochnik, "Teaching Virtue: The Contrasting Arguments (Dissoi Logoi) of Antiquity," Journal of Education 179 (1997): 1–13.

6. Scheffler, "Moral Education and the Democratic Ideal," (note 5), p. 143.

7. Nussbaum seems to share this view: critical thinking, the paradigm of which is Socratic examination, is "essential to full humanity," and the Stoics’ ideal of the world citizen "is intrinsically valuable: for it recognizes in people what is fundamental about them, most worthy of reverence and acknowledgment, namely their aspirations to justice and goodness and their capacities for reasoning in this connection" (note 1) p. 40, p. 60.