Teaching

Old Ideas, New Audiences

Analytic philosophy sometimes has a reputation for being obscure, arcane, and irrelevant to the interests of anyone but philosophers. However, I believe that core topics in philosophy are more relevant than students think and I am passionate about opening their eyes through courses catered to their academic, professional, and recreational interests.

Thinking and Doing

I believe that one of philosophy’s virtues is how it teaches students the skill of careful thinking. I think the best way to develop this ability is through writing and rewriting with an eye towards clarity and precision. In order to help students hone the rigour of their thought, I incorporate various writing exercises into my classes and I emphasize the importance of well-articulated theses on assignments.

When teaching logic, I try to strike the right balance between technical carefulness and practical accessibility. I make sure to define terms and prove results with full generality, but I devote a significance amount of time to working with the concepts we develop and I explain to students how logic is very much a tool they must learn to use.

I recently co-designed and co-taught a course called Philosophy through Sports which reframed classic philosophical puzzles in terms of sports. In a similar vein, I am currently working on a class which uses sci-fi stories of alien encounters to motivate questions about linguistic content, radical translation, metaphors, and more.

I have also TA’ed for other creatively-crafted courses such as Philosophy and the Scientific Revolution and Philosophy and Literature.

As a graduate teaching assistant for Bing Honors College, I run two-week bootcamps preparing students to write their honours thesis. I introduce the students to research tools, teach them free-writing techniques, and walk them through exercises aimed at refining their questions and theses.

I am currently teaching PHIL22003: Logic at the University of Arkansas, the syllabus for which can be found here.