I. Skills Goals:

The interrogative and critical attitude that philosophy aims to cultivate is not an untutored or naïve tendency to question anything and everything: Although philosophers recognize a certain similarity of this attitude to the child’s persistent questioning, the salient difference between the mere fact of asking questions and the educated disposition to question critically, lies in the acquisition of certain intellectual, ethical, and affective capacities that constitute the necessary conditions of specifically philosophical questioning.

1. Intellectual Skills:

Philosophy is one of the most demanding of pursuits which requires highly developed intellectual capacities in many specific areas.

A. Critical and Logical Capacities: At the very heart of the philosophical attitude lies highly developed skills in critical thinking and logical analysis. Since the answer to a question must always be justified for philosophy, the ability to ascertain whether a proposed answer is plausibly articulated and justified is the most fundamental intellectual capacity for the philosopher.

1. Ability to identify arguments justifying assertions.

a. Ability to differentiate between claims of evidence and justification and the claims being justified.

b. Ability to distinguish between arguments and other non-inferential intentions: explanation, exemplification, et al.

2. Ability to analyze arguments into their constituent parts.

3. Ability to evaluate arguments for logical validity, soundness, cogency and strength.

4. Ability to identify factual claims upon which arguments rest and ability to locate relevant evidence concerning those claims.

5. Ability to evaluate the relevant evidence for factual claims or to identify the relevant forms of expertise to make an informed judgments.

6. Ability to identify concealed presuppositions of arguments and interrogate their justification.

7. Ability to construct argumentative responses to arguments.

8. Ability to construct and defend valid and cogent arguments in support of one’s own views.

9. Ability to identify typical patterns of rhetorical obfuscation and logically fallacious reasoning.

B. Interpretive Capacities:

1. Ability to interpret texts

2. Ability to identify issues (i.e., concrete theses and disagreements) underlying debates and discussions.

3. Ability to identify author’s intentions.

C. Other Intellectual Capacities:

Since the abilities of critical analysis and interpretation are instantiated in writing and discussion the following aptitudes are required and cultivated throughout our philosophical curriculum. Philosophy involves a particularly demanding form of abstract argumentative analysis, and this translates into the need for highly developed skills in writing and conversation. It is probable that the lack of these skills is a primary reason for the inability of some students to thrive in philosophy courses. Thus, our role is generally one of refine an already existent capacity for clear, well-formed writing. Interestingly a significant number of our majors and minors have been double majors in English and (or) creative writing: also a significant number have been trained as writing assistants (or worked as Colloquium teaching assistants). We will not enumerate the capacities involved in writing and speaking well here, believing that they are crudely yet plausibly , though tentatively understood as a matter of “translation” of the capacities delineated above in the written and spoken word.

D. Intellectually Creative Goals:

A “skill” based paradigm for analyzing progress (and hence an “outcomes” based paradigm) is ultimately inadequate for any discipline that seeks to cultivate innovation and creativity.

We want to signal here with this category of skills the fact that the best philosophical work is “creative” in the sense that it articulates a new insight, interpretation, argument, or possibility in the work of thinking. It involves creative appropriation of the tradition in the service of innovative insights into one’s experiences. In this sense, all philosophical education aims for “originality.” This does not expect that the student discovers something radically new in the history of thought, but rather that their thinking “originates” in their exploration, understanding, and appropriation of the significance of the great questions and answers bequeathed in the philosophical tradition.

II. Ethical Capacities:

We describe under this heading, the values that we believe philosophical education rests upon. The inculcation of these values is not something done over and beyond the cultivation of intellectual skills: They are fundamentally co-implicated in the intellectual capacities at which philosophical education aims. They include the following goods or values:

1. of logical clarity and rigor.

2. of justification for beliefs.

3. of studying ethical or intellectual frameworks with which one does not agree.

4. of a respectful and careful interpretation of texts and arguments with which one does not agree.

5. of confronting the strongest arguments against one’s own beliefs and values in order to discover the truth about them.

6. of uncovering hidden presuppositions in order to evaluate fully the arguments for beliefs and values.

III. Affective Dispositions:

Philosophy, as was said at its beginning, begins in wonder . This wonder, however, is not merely an external initiating event, but the fundamental ground experience of philosophical thought. Without this wonder at the “facts,”— about the given, the obvious, and the certain—we cannot open the possibility of the radical questioning into the meaning, legitimacy, and nature of these “facts.” Thus, philosophy always arises out of and returns to a fundamental affective condition of wonder at the world and at ourselves. This wonder is cultivated through and cultivates additionally a fundamental “ interestedness ” and curiosity . Successful philosophical training should manifest itself in these qualities and characteristics as dispositions to be affected by the world and our experience of it.

An education in philosophy is guided by the desire for the truth as “love of wisdom.” In the cultivation of this desire, philosophy demands the cultivation of a disposition towards a critical confrontation with “otherness.” Although philosophy aims at truth as such, its approach requires learning to listen and understand positions, theories, and arguments that seem on the surface to be perverse or absurd. Successful philosophical education should thus manifest itself in a willingness to explore and evaluate on their own merits positions and perspectives that are foreign, strange, or even unnerving. But this must be merely an uncritical acceptance of difference for its own sake, or, even worse, a unwillingness to judge the coherence, the plausibility, and ultimately the truth and goodness of these perspectives and positions. In its specifically philosophical form, it is always bound up with the evaluative and interrogative intellectual dispositions essential to philosophy as a search for the truth.

Finally, philosophy cultivates a healthy skeptical disposition towards not only from the beliefs and commitments of one’s own culture or society, but also of one’s own. The fundamental affective disposition of philosophy involves an awareness of the uncertainty of our beliefs and a willingness to open and re-open these beliefs to critical scrutiny.