Category: Teaching

Teaching for 2009-10

This coming year I will be teaching the following courses:

Fall-Winter: POLS 950, our core Ph.D. course for political theory students

Fall: POLS 451, a seminar on pluralism, toleration and public reason.

Winter: POLS 456, a seminar on libertarianism.
Winter: POLS 354, a lecture course on democratic theory.

POLS 451 will be a revised version of this term’s course. POLS 456 will be a new course on libertarianism, in which I plan to read the classics of libertarian thought: Friedman, Hayek, Nozick, maybe even Ayn Rand. The course will focus on standard, “right-libertarianism,” but it will conclude by addressing recent debates about “left-libertarianism” (Vallentyne, Steiner, Otsuka, Van Parijs). References to the main writings in each category can be found here

Laptop Bans

Interesting discussion over at Volokh.com prompted by law prof Eugene Volokh banning laptops from class. He did it as an experiment and then ran a survey and reported back to his colleagues. In general students reported greater levels of attention and interest in class, but found that their notes were less useful. Volokh arranged for one person per class to bring a computer, take notes, and share them. Some commenters in the discussion thread suggested banning internet rather than laptops. Of course there are always web-enabled cell phones, that don’t even need wi-fi, but they’re much less obtrusive. Volokh points out that it would be nice to have research about the effects of the presence of laptops on academic results, rather than just on student perceptions of learning.
Continue reading Laptop Bans

Draft POLS451 Reading List

This is a tentative list of the required readings for my upcoming seminar on religion and politics, which will focus on the question of the relationship between religious toleration and public reason.

Week 1: Introduction 

Week 2: The Christian Debate

  • Joseph Lecler, Toleration and the Reformation (New York: Association Press, 1960).Volume1, Chapters 1-4 (Old Testament – Medieval).
  • Istvan Bejczy, “Tolerantia: A Medieval Concept,” Journal of the History of Ideas 58, no. 3 (1997): 365-84. 
  • Roland Bainton, “Sebastian Castellio and the Toleration Controversy of the 16th Century,” in Persecution and Liberty; Essays in Honor of George Lincoln Burr (New York: The Century Co, 1931).

Continue reading Draft POLS451 Reading List

Using TW + Wikispaces

Like many other profs, I started using the internet by posting lecture outlines online – PDFs of PowerPoint slides.  But a friend of mine who knows something about the web asked why I didn’t just email the files, since I was using the web purely as a distribution mechanism.  Good point!  The potential benefit of the web over emailed PDFs would lie in converting the slides into linked pages, so that students could navigate from one idea to a related idea, or between multiple instances of a single idea, rather than having stacks of slides organized in one linear fashion.  The logical structure of the material is web-like, so why shouldn’t it’s physical structure online be web-like?  So I started making webpages to go along with presentation slides.

Immediately I ran into a problem. Continue reading Using TW + Wikispaces

Student Notebook

I like to use slides in lecture because I think it can help students follow the argument – to see its logical structure.  So long as there isn’t too much text on the screen, it can be helpful to be able to see how I distinguish the different points I’m making, and to note when I’m moving from one point to another, and to see that one point is a “level 1” point, while another is a “level 2” point.  I also want to provide these slides to the students, because I don’t want them to feel that they have to furiously scribble down everything I say.  If they have my slides, then they can have more time to listen and think and ask questions in class, because they only have to take notes to fill in the details, to make comments or indicate questions, and so on.  

Once students have my slides, however, there is a question about how they integrate their own notes with my slides. Continue reading Student Notebook

Reading Course on Political Liberalism / Public Justification

Following this fall’s graduate reading course on Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, I am considering doing another such course during winter term on Rawls’s Political Liberalism, plus some of the surrounding literature on public justification.  Enrollment would be limited.  If anyone in politics or philosophy is interested, please let me know.  You don’t have to have taken the first course to take the second, but familiarity with the arguments of Theory would be helpful.

POLS 451

POLS 451 will be about religion and politics.  The first third of the course will look at the history of debates about religious toleration in Europe.  The second third of the course will be about the attempt of recent liberal theorists such as John Rawls and Charles Larmore to “apply toleration to philosophy itself” and so develop a “political liberalism,” based on the demand for public justification; the exercise of political power is justified only if justifiable to every member of society, which means reasonably acceptable by each without anyone having to give up the religious, philosophical or ethical doctrine they (reasonably) espouse.  The last part of the course will involve debates about this idea of public reason or public justification in the context of specific policy debates, such as abortion and same-sex marriage.  If you have any questions about the course, please let me know.