A Heretical Idea: Teaching Philosophy while Skipping Plato
I’ll get some blow back for even thinking this, but …
I’ve taught philosophy to university students for over 20 years. In trying to explain philosophy to others, I have learned more about philosophy than when I was a student.
Always, I have sought to show students how philosophy relates to their everyday lives. I present to them how the ideas of important philosophers help us address the issues we face, how approaching the world with a philosophical mindset helps them understand and handle life’s problems big and small. For years, I have been honing my Introduction to Philosophy course, to better and better assist the students to learn philosophy. I should point out that most of my students are non-majors and have had no prior experience with philosophy.
A major shortcoming of most philosophy textbooks is how little attention they give to recent philosophy. They give students the false impression that philosophy was a pursuit of the past, now obsolete. Frustrated by that and other deficiencies of the available Intro textbooks (the exorbitant price tags included), I spent a few years writing my own, which was published last year. I felt it important to present to my students a textbook that gives a chronology of Western philosophy’s development that includes…
