Teaching

Teaching Philosophy, Goals, and Approaches

Although students typically come to RIT to take advantage of its applied and technical focus, they make excellent philosophers!  Teaching at an institution as unique as RIT is a personally exhilarating and professionally rewarding experience.  Every class is an opportunity to inspire students—to awaken their academic curiosity, to foster respect for intellectually rigorous inquiry, and to make the process of discovery an exhilarating experience.  Every class is also an opportunity to learn from inspiring students.  It is immensely satisfying to see philosophy anew in response to the enthusiasm, creativity, and sometimes applied focus that RIT students display.

My classes are very well subscribed, contain large volumes of repeat students at the upper-level, are always highly evaluated, and have been successful enough to warrant multiple Eisenhart award nominations.  These positive outcomes arise because of the six goals that structure my teaching.

1. My first goal is to present RIT students with accessible, interesting, and pertinent material.  Students leave my classes aware that despite philosophy’s complications, it is never beyond their reach.  They come to realize that although philosophy contains problems that specialists are devoted to, its scope extends far beyond the narrow confines of professional concerns.  Since my area of research specialization is philosophy of technology, RIT students find my upper-level courses customized to their needs and capable of enhancing their areas of professional focus.

2. My second goal is to foster a passion for learning by providing RIT students with challenging problems.  The history of philosophy is replete with intellectually and emotionally challenging puzzles of varying difficulty.  When the canon is shown to have an enduring connection to contemporary issues, students find themselves smitten with a desire to converse and think in philosophical terms.  By focusing on questions and ideas that people have changed the course of history and which people made life and death decisions over, my classes create a dialogue across time that all participants can find gripping.

3. My third goal is to create a collaborative learning environment.  This goal is achieved by coming to class prepared to discuss classical and contemporary texts and  assuring RIT students that I genuinely am interested in their perspectives on each issue covered.  Because students deserve a chance to feel intrinsically connected to their coursework, I provide them with opportunities to sort out the assigned issues by relating them to their own experiences.  To further this end, I often hide my own opinions, cover a diverse range of perspectives, and encourage students to follow the principle of charity in debating with authors of text and their classmates.  These strategies help students see philosophy as a tool that fosters self-discovery and empowerment, as does my commitment to updating current discussions by emphasizing issues that past students found resonant.  To widen the range of collaborative possibilities, I regularly invite guest-lecturers from across the institute and from outside of RIT, teach team-taught courses, and offer structural incentives for students to attend RIT sponsored lectures and conferences.

4. My fourth goal is to help RIT students cultivate intellectual self-esteem.  Many of RIT’s undergraduates initially are intimidated by the prospect of taking a philosophy course.  By convincing them that they have the potential to successfully grapple with complex and abstract material, my students quickly overcome this prejudice.  In turn, they tend to become better public speakers, more engaged in university culture, and even cite improvement in their other course work.

5. My fifth goal is to be adaptive.

5a. To adapt to Departmental needs, I regularly teach both general lower-level and area-specific upper-level classes.

5b. To adapting to student needs, I regularly: offer independent studies, revise my courses, create new courses, offer structured opportunities that connect academic course work with real life demands, and make use of diverse teaching methods.

6. My sixth goal is to establish long-term rapport with RIT students who find philosophy compelling.  I thus take the time to correspond with alumni, and, when possible, participate directly in their post-RIT lives.

Courses Taught at RIT

Introduction to Philosophy
This course is an introduction to some of the major problems, methods, and insights of philosophy as expressed in readings from both classical and contemporary sources. The aim of the course is help students develop an interest and ability to think philosophically and to express philosophical thought clearly. Students will acquire problem solving and critical thinking skills by examining discussions about: reality, knowledge, truth, God, self-identity, freedom, and the nature of ethical and political beliefs.

Philosophy of Technology
Technology is a ubiquitous and defining force in our world. This course investigates how our conceptions of technology have emerged within philosophy, and examines the role technology plays in shaping how we live and reflect upon questions of meaning and value. Technological modes of understanding, organizing, and transforming the world shape our relationships with others, with ourselves, and with nature at fundamental levels. We will explore how these modes have emerged and why they do so predominantly within a Western social and intellectual context.

Sustainability Ethics
Although it is widely agreed that sustainability is an important goal, disagreement exists as to what sustainability actually means and why citizens, governments, and institutions should view it as an urgent priority.  The purpose of this class is to critically review some of the most highly regarded analyses of sustainability in order for students to gain a better understanding of the moral and political values, principles, and virtues that advocates claim promote sustainable living.

Minds and Machines
Present and potential technological developments in artificial intelligence and artificial life pose a variety of challenges to traditional accounts of intelligence, life, and personhood. Is the mind a machine—possibly a computer? Can machines think? If they can, do they process information in the same way that humans do? Why might it matter if humans and machines fundamentally process information differently? Could artifacts deserve moral consideration?

Philosophy of Vision and Imaging
Appeals to sight, to the rhetoric of seeing, and to various media and technologies of imaging have had an enormous impact on philosophy and on human culture generally. This course will introduce students to the philosophy of vision and imaging by critically investigating four interrelated sets of concerns: (1) the relation between appeals to vision and the imaging technologies that mediate what and how we see, and (2) the relation between imaging technologies and the acquisition and representation of knowledge, and (3) the relations between imaging technologies and human identity and agency, and (4) the relations between imaging theories/practices and ethical, political, ideological, and social contexts. The following questions will guide our inquiry. How do the applications of imaging technologies shape our experience of perception, identity and subjectivity, agency, and authority—as well as our ability to theorize them?

Great Thinkers: Heidegger and Technology
This “Great Thinkers” course is an introduction to Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of technology. Heidegger’s interpretation of technology—its meaning in Western history and its role in contemporary affairs—is, perhaps, the single most influential position in the field. Our primary goal is to examine critically the enduring relevance of Heidegger’s concerns: his view that human beings are fundamentally world disclosers, his claim that the intelligibility of the contemporary world is delimited by a technological understanding of being, and his normative appeal to the saving power of focal practices.

Philosophy of Peace
This course is a philosophical examination of issues related to peace and global justice.  Our guiding premise is that effective resistance to widespread violence, human rights violations, and poverty requires critical thinking as well as committed action.

Philosophy of Science
This course provides an overview of traditional problems and some recent developments in the philosophy of science. The kinds of questions we will pursue are: What counts as rationality in science? Is there a reliable method that can yield objective knowledge? What is the metaphysical status of the things which science investigates? What is a scientific explanation? What is the difference between scientific and other types of inquiry? What are the social dimensions of science? What is the ideal relation between democracy and expertise?

Philosophy of Expertise
Questions about how to identify experts and when to defer to them remain daunting. Indeed, while the problem of whether genuine expertise can be distinguished from its social markers cuts across and even reshapes disciplinary boundaries, the conundrum of how to classify and organize different kinds of expertise traverses descriptive and prescriptive terrain. The goal of this seminar is to explore these and related issues by employing methods and insights from different traditions of critical philosophy.

Honors: Design Research
This course is part of the Collaborative Innovation Program, a year-long series of nine coordinated courses that all focus on one multi-disciplinary problem, expressed by a question. This year’s question is as follows: How do we create Practices, Furnishings, and Technologies that support Multi-Disciplinary Collaboration?

Co-Ops that I’ve Directed at RIT:

  • Game Design for Sustainability Ethics: along with Tom Seager and David Schwartz, supervised Daniel Whiddon on a 40 hr per week co-op for the Winter 2009-2010 term at RIT.

Independent Studies that I’ve Directed at RIT:

• Philosophy of Artificial Life
• Technology and the Literature of Change
• Modeling Prejudice Reduction I
• Modeling Prejudice Reduction II
• Philosophy of Identity
•  Philosophical Analysis of the “Culture Based Approach” to Design and Product Development