Abstract:

In this talk, I discuss four models—focusing on the last—for teaching the history of modern philosophy in ways that break with the standard Seven Great Men canon that is standard in most college and university modern philosophy courses. The first is a canon + supplementary presentation model, which preserves the core of the typical modern philosophy course (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant) while inviting/requiring students to give presentations on other philosophers during the time period. A second model changes up the standard canon, for instance by incorporating Elizabeth and/or Cavendish and/or Astell alongside Descartes or Shepherd alongside Hume or by replacing Leibniz with Anne Conway. A third model radically reduces the overall quantity of “main” figures in order to have more focused discussion on a wider range of issues within a smaller number of figures (including more ethics, race and gender theory, etc.). The version I’ll discuss focuses on just three philosophers: Descartes, Hume, and Sor Juana. The discussion of these three models will provide an autobiographical-historical introduction to the fourth model, on which the talk will focus.

The fourth model for teaching modern de-centers both the traditional (male) canonical figures and the centrality of the professor himself. In my version of this approach, I start my modern European philosophy courses by pointing out to students the hegemony of the traditional canon but also the exciting fact that the canon is being increasingly questioned and creatively modified, especially over the past decade or so. Then I invite the students to envision what a new history of modern philosophy might look like. Drawing on Lisa Shapiro and Marcy Lascano’s new anthology, students are organized into groups around philosophical themes that they choose for themselves (themes like “philosophy of mind,” “love,” “morality,” or “human nature”). As a group, each small group will read a wide range of early modern philosophers on that theme (typically 10-12 philosophers, split up amongst the members of the group), and they will, together, select 4-6 on whom the entire class will focus. Together, they design a 5-day sequence of class sessions on their theme.

The talk will focus on how this fourth model works in practice, how it might be scaled up (from the 20-25 student sections I currently teach to larger lecture courses), and what lessons I’ve learned from observing students’ engagement with modern philosophy in the context of this (and earlier) counter-canonical approaches to the teaching of modern philosophy. (Sample syllabi for my current course template and for various iterations of my modern course can be found at http://people.whitman.edu/~frierspr/courses.html.)