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Articles

Welcome To My Philosophy Class

Lecturer Wayne Buck has written a letter to his students explaining what philosophy is, and how to do it.

Note to the reader: After teaching introductory philosophy courses for several years, I realized that many students immediately get off on the wrong foot, struggling with the material much more than they need to. Discussions with those students revealed that they often bring several common assumptions about what philosophy is into the classroom. I wrote this letter as a counter to those assumptions, making suggestions about how to approach the challenges of reading and writing philosophy. Inevitably, imbedded in these suggestions is a certain view of the nature of philosophy. Whether this stance on the nature of philosophy is correct or incorrect, the suggestions in the letter have had the practical result of noticeably improving how well students do in the course.

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