June 1, 2006
Racial Essentialism
I don't know if anyone is still checking anything here, but I thought I'd try to draw attention to a post on my own blog in case anyone is. I'm trying to work out a taxonomy of the various views someone might hold regarding the nature of racial groups. One of the views, sometimes called racial realism, takes races to be natural kinds something like species in biology. I'm not trying to evaluate this view at this point, just to categorize what view there might be. It seems to me that there's a great variety of possible views even within racial realism, and I'm working out some of what that variety is.
One concern that keeps arising is the use of the term 'racial essentialism', which I think is supposed to be some sort of racial realism, but most who use it don't make it clear what they mean or why they call it a kind of essentialism. I'm trying to work out the various things someone might mean when calling a view racial essentialism, and I'm looking for help in sorting through the views I've come up with and identifying any possibilities I might have missed. The post is here for any who are interested.
Since this blog is basically defunct until some Syracuse grad students want to revive it (in which case I'll happily be involved and continue to maintain the blog), I'm keeping the comments and trackbacks closed. The comments and trackbacks on the post I'm referring you to at my blog are open.
Posted by Jeremy at 8:35 AM
November 12, 2005
Deceitful Grading
I have two students whose take-home exams seem to follow the same lines of argument in a few questions. They use different sentence structure but use largely the same vocabulary and make mostly the same points in the same order. They didn't answer all the same questions, and sometimes one said a lot more than the other, but it really looks as if they were working together on some of the questions and deliberately trying to avoid looking as if they did. So here's my question. I had the thought to grade a couple of their similar answers with drastically different grades. If indeed they cheated, and I rob one of them of a whole bunch of points, the student probably deserves a lot worse. But it's not fair. I should do it to both. That's the downside of my plan. The upside is that it would almost assuredly motivate them to come to me to complain, and then I could point out how remarkably similar their exams were with both exams right in front of them. I'm not asking for advice here. I'm not going to do this. What I'm interested in is the ethical question. Would it be wrong to do something like this?
Posted by Jeremy at 9:53 PM | Comments (25)
April 7, 2005
New Bennett Translations
For those following Jonathan Bennett's translations of early modern texts, he's added more works. Here's his description of the newest material:
In March I added Mill's On Liberty and Leibniz�s Making the Case for God, a 20-page Latin work originally published as an appendix to the French Theodicy with a long title starting Causa Dei Asserta. This was meant as a more rigorous version of the over-all argument of the longer but more informal work, and is not included in any of the Leibniz English-language anthologies currently in print.I have now (late March 2005) barely begun work on Kant's Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals.
I've never even heard of this Leibniz work. I'm intrigued. I know Bennett thinks the Theodicy is pretty shoddy, so if he thinks this is more rigorous then that's probably a good sign. It's also shorter and possibly of more use in a course that isn't just about Leibniz than the longer book, which Nicholas Jolley says is just too rambling to be of much use in a course setting. This would seem to solve both problems.
Of course, the Mill and Kant pieces are nice additions as well, but I'm a real Leibniz fan, so I had to take particular delight in that.
Posted by Jeremy at 2:05 PM
April 6, 2005
Medieval Teaching Resources?
I'm going to be teaching an ancient and medieval course for the first time this summer. I think I'll be fine on the ancient stuff. I'm planning to use Julia Annas' anthology that organizes readings by topics. I'm required to cover Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Descartes(!), but I'd like to focus a good deal on the Hellenistics and Augustine as well, and I hope to do a bit on the pre-Socratics as well. I think I'm good on the ancients and ok on Augustine, as long as I can find my notes from the Hellenistic seminar Bonnie Kent did in her one graduate course in her one year at Syracuse (she spent the last two weeks on City of God). What I don't have much of a sense with is what to do with the medievals beyond Augustine or how to integrate him with the others (besides the Hellenistics, which I could do passably). Does anyone know of any good resources for teaching medieval philosophy, preferably online? Does anyone have any ideas as to how to integrate the later people with the earlier ones? Annas' book organizes topically, and I'd prefer to do the whole course that way and not just for the ancient portion and then by philosopher from then on. I refuse to do the theory of forms or problem of universals in an introductory course, and much of what people talk about is related to that. Any ideas? I'm also interested in any insight into particular sections of Augustine or Aquinas that would tie in with the other philosophers I'll be dealing with, so if anyone knows of a convenient list of those I'd appreciate it.
Posted by Jeremy at 8:16 PM
January 30, 2005
PHI 171: Critical Thinking
I will be teaching PHI 171: Critical Thinking 1st Summer Session (which I never have taught) and hope that I may borrow someone's syllabus who has taught the class before --- preferably someone who used Tom McKay's book.
Please send to kkukla at syr dot edu
Thank you.
Posted by kkukla at 11:06 AM
January 29, 2005
Contemporary Natural Law
I've asked this of a few of you in person, but let me throw it out there. I'm looking for a good, relatively short article on contemporary natural law theory. I use the Rachels book for my Intro to Ethics classes, but I'm just not too happy with his section on NLT and I think it needs to be supplemented. But my preliminary searches haven't really turned up anything I'm thrilled with. Specifically, I'm looking for an article that discusses a contemporary NLT perspective on some of the traditional problems raised for the theory (by Rachels and others) -- e.g. the difficulty of settling on a proper sense of "natural" that makes the theory plausible, and avoiding (or addressing) the naturalistic fallacy. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Posted by dbzdak at 4:58 PM | Comments (2)
January 23, 2005
canned local grad
I don't happen to know much about this local event but I guess it is reason enough for some people to sweat. These things happen, maybe for good reasons, maybe for other reasons--my guess is that what the administration did was perfectly legal. But we have written some fun, maybe controvercial, papers...What if one of those was taken for being representative of our "teaching philosophy"? Some people might have read Hugh LaFollette's paper on licensing parents--a little bit controvercial. Should we take this as representative of the man? I guess not. Does anyone have an opinion on this issue?
Posted by cmaxfield at 10:13 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
January 12, 2005
Help!
At the last minute, I discovered that the textbook I've chosen for this coming semester (Stephen Darwall's Philosophical Ethics) is out-of-stock with no date from the publisher as to when it will be available. My second choice was Shelly Kagan's Normative Ethics, not because I think Darwall's book is better (I don't really have much experience with either) but because I wanted to do both meta-ethics and normative ethics, and Darwall covers both. These were the only two booksI looked at that appealed to me given my very particular criteria for the courses I'm teaching this semester (a text and not an anthology that is sufficient for a class of students who have had two philosophy courses but no ethics and also for a class of students at a different school, all of whom are taking at least their second ethics course, some of whom used James Rachels' Elements of Moral Philosophy, my preferred book, in their first course).
That means I'm stuck using Kagan's book now without having had any chance to look through it and figure out how the semester will go. For one of the classes, it will arrive around the time the class starts. For the other I have maybe a week of classes before I have the book. Suffice it to say that I'm not in a good position. I have to figure out at least a tentative syllabus in the next day or so, in order to get my reasings for the first week submitted to the library for scanning in for online reserve. That means I need to work out my schedule for the semester fairly soon. Is there anyone who has used this as the sole or primary textbook for something on the order of a 300-level (junior level) course who has a syllabus you wouldn't mind sending me to give me some ideas to start with for organizing my course? Normally I wouldn't want to rely on someone else's structure for a course, but given my time constraints it would help to see what others have done with this book if I can.
Posted by Jeremy at 3:08 PM | Comments (1)
Next Gen
I've just read an exciting article on the New Yorker website, linked from Arts and Letters Daily, written by Dan Baum. From this, I think there may be useful insights into undergraduate (standard intro. phil/ critical thinking type) teaching. The topic of the article is one of the things that excites me, as you may see for yourself, but while conjuring syllabi for the impending semester, I wonder how this information may be integrated. Here's the article:
I was stunned last semester when a student noted the difference between my generation and theirs. I think that we teach, or rather the way we teach, is in part a response to how we were taught--corrections, emulations, and adjustments to allow for the various new trends, technologies, and ready information. We've seen the creative (and sometimes unethical) use of unlimited (web) information by our students, how they can glean much more in a 50 minute lecture than they can in (alleged) 3 hours of reading. We have seen some of the amazing arguments and juggling acts younger students produce and perform (I am always impressed by smart people). How can we manage and utilize these generational differences while fulfilling our most basic role as educators (the freshman and sophomore readin, writin, critical thinkin stuff)? So that's my question, malformed as it is, wherever it leads...
Posted by cmaxfield at 11:02 AM | Comments (3)
December 21, 2004
Teaching Evaluations
There's a good discussion on teaching evaluations going on at Crooked Timber.
Posted by Jeremy at 9:21 AM
November 19, 2004
Mind Body Unit
Does anyone have suggestions for teaching the mind-body problem? I just finished this unit and once again found it difficult. I can't seem to get the students interested in the different views. So, if any of you have ideas, I'd sure like to hear them.
Posted by jwollam at 4:31 PM | Comments (13)
November 15, 2004
Epistemology/Film
Could anyone suggest a good movie(s) that introduces the fundamental concepts in (classic) Epistemology? One day I hope to introduce every philosophical concept through film.
Posted by kkukla at 12:25 AM | Comments (5)
August 28, 2004
Plagiarism
Mark Steen is, of course, the god of catching plagiarists in our department. However, after teaching a summer session of 191, I have a rather unique case. I assigned two papers for the six week course: the first was a very specific question on an ethical issue and the second was a question related to an ethical theory covered. In the case of two student athletes I noticed a discernable difference in the quality of their first and second papers. The first student wrote first an eloquent paper on abortion with well-documented footnotes and excellent philosophic and stylistic content. His second paper was a shoddy attempt at discussing utilitarianism. The language was much more informal and gone were the footnotes. The second student also wrote a thoughtful first paper on abortion, but then wrote a paper of much lower quality for the second assignment. The difference was more marked in the case of the first student, but still noticeable in the case of the second. In both cases I mined the papers extensively looking for signs of plagiarism. However, I couldn't find any. These weren't papers that contained anything google could find, and there weren't abrupt sylistic changes, changes in footnotes, or anything else that would indicate they had been taken from a paper mill or been tailored from some other paper. So, I began to wonder if this was a case of the first papers being written by the students' tutors, or something else. And then I began to wonder if anyone else has run into cases like this, and what sort of response would be appropriate for future findings. Usually, when I teach over the course of the semester, the papers aren't a big surprise. Like Mark suggests, when you know your students, you can often tell (especially over the course of a few assignments) what their works is like. But, in teaching such a short course, I was a bit baffled at first and wondered if the intensity coupled with the athletic schedule had led them to turn in lower quality work, or if it was something else.
Posted by jwollam at 2:56 PM | Comments (4)
May 30, 2004
Audio Book Project
In exchange for a very nice gift, I promised Man-Steen I would post something to this blog. I decided to use the opportunity ask for comments on a project I started with Dan, which is in its very early stage of existence. From the project's temporary homepage:
This site is dedicated to hosting public domain readings of public domain philosophical classics. The .mp3 files in our library are licensed under the Academic Free License v. 2.0, and may be copied, distributed and edited with minimal restrictions.The primary motivation of the project is to create a pedagogical supplement and improve the comprehensibility of the great books of philosophy. Our broader goals are described in our Manifesto. To expand our library, you only need a computer, microphone and some free software. Help us grow. To use our resources in your class, give your students our URL or link to the .mp3 files directly.
Posted by dhoracek at 1:50 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack
May 8, 2004
Some notes on how to catch plagiarizers, and, how to prevent plagiarism
I have a certain notoriety in the SU philosophy department for being an ardent and effective catcher of plagiarizers, around 35-45 to date in 5 � years of teaching (this number includes only the genuine heinous forms of plagiarizing, not the non-disciplinary-meriting plagiarizing done when one is uneducated about what constitutes plagiarizing, or is too ardent a practitioner of the uncited paraphrase, both of which merely merit a re-write). We�ll ignore the possibility that something about me makes more students plagiarize and operate instead on the assumption that the plagiarism is roughly equal, it�s just that others are missing them. Others often ask me, �how do you do it?�, and I don�t have any short answer, except an unhelpful �I look for irregularities�. In the following I�ll try to actually answer this question I frequently get in more detail, including all the possible indicators of plagiarism that I can think of that warrant doing at least some online research. Many of the following indicators can be innocent, merely indicating carelessness, poor citation skills, inconsistent methods of formatting, etc.. Some of these are so obvious as to barely merit mention, but I do so only out of a concern for completeness. Also note that these tips are mostly for introductory courses that freshmen tend to take. Much of what here seem warning signs would not be for, say, a 500-level course. Feedback and additional indicators that I may not have thought of are welcome. So, I hold that the following, if they come up, give you prima facie reasons for searching the web (or other sources). Almost none of these are at all sufficient for indicating that plagiarism has in fact occurred, however.
Indicators: 1. Bad Writing/Good Writing This, of course, is the most common cause for alarm, and sets bells off in even the beginning TA. Several paragraphs or sentences of piss-poor prose or moderate writing is followed by excellent writing, profundity, etc. 2. Differences of Style Often plagiarism is indicated not merely by the above irregularities, but less severe changes in style, where the quality overall is consistently poor or moderate. This often happens when a student buys a paper from a paper-mill site which, while on the same rough topic, is different enough so that the student had to customize it to fit the bill. Look especially for an introduction and conclusion that do not match the body of the paper in style, or coverage of one issue that differs in style quite a bit from the rest of the paper. 3. Citation Indicators Scan your students� endnotes and footnotes. Sometimes you�ll find that the citations that refer to the anthologized articles covered in class are to where the articles originally appeared, or to a different anthology/reader than you use. Often in this case the student bought the paper and just didn�t bother to check for these kinds of details. Also, look at the page numbers cited. Sometimes you�ll find that the page numbers they list have no relation to the page numbers of the articles in the anthology/reader you use, even if the rest of the bibliographic info is the same. Another red-flag is when the references used by the students in the paper are not to the papers you employed in the course, but rather to different papers on the same subjects by the same authors. For instance, suppose a student wants to write a paper on Taylor on free will. They will search google, find a paper on Taylor on free will, but in this paper the author speaks of Taylor�s treatment in another article than the one you used. Another warning sign is a particularly rich bibliography. Some freshman just happen to be well-motivated and genuinely interested in the topics and doing extra research, but most, of course, aren�t. Again, be wary when the bibliography mentions many outside sources, but few, or none of the original class materials. If you use a standard anthology, such as Reason and Responsibility, and you are using, say, the 11th edition, look at the bibliography. If they cite the fifth edition, something could be awry. Look for two entirely different styles of citation in the paper. For instance, in one place, a student might single-space and indent long paragraphs, in another place they are double-spaced and not indented. In one place, they might cite in parentheses, in another, footnotes. Of course this could always be sloppiness, but I have caught plagiarism by looking for this. 4. Content Indicators Make sure that the essay content carefully matches the essay question. Often you�ll find a paper that roughly matches the essay assignment, but is off in certain key respects. For instance, say your essay question asked about the differences between active voluntary euthanasia and passive voluntary euthanasia. If the student essay ignores this distinction and instead focuses on assisted suicide versus nonvoluntary euthanasia, it might not be mere sloppiness on the student�s part, but plagiarism. Often when students search on the �net for papers, they just want something close enough. I once caught a plagiarized paper on functionalism and identity theory because the student, who was asked to talk about their differences, and which theory is superior, spent a long time covering the distinction between type- and token- identity theory, and different varieties of functionalism. While of course this would be good and show a depth of understanding and commitment to research in many cases, it can also indicate that they just stole a paper which was in answer to a different essay question. Look for terminology that you didn�t use in the course and is unexplained in the student paper. While I did cover functionalism in one course, I was surprised to hear mention of �hermeneutic functionalism� in a student�s paper. Sure enough, Ned Block was one of my students. There�s a certain style for writing handouts which you should look out for in your student�s papers. When a paper reads like a list from a handout condensed down into straightforward prose, it could be taken from one. Also, sometimes a definition or an explanation just looks too good, too economical and graceful. Hopefully you have memorized your own current handouts, or handouts you wrote previously. Also, you should know, or have copies of, all the handouts that other current teachers of 107 (or 191) have, or have used. Many students have friends in other sections of the same course with different teachers, and they exchange handouts. Also, you should know the website content of your colleagues who teach the same courses. Often they will take material from there without citation, especially from Dan Orr and Jeremy Pierce, handout writers par excellance. Also, look at the content and see if any of it violates your explicit instructions as given in the assignment. For instance; no outside sources, focusing on three papers when you said to only focus on two, and so on. I�ve often found, if other things seem fishy, and if a website is cited often, I look at that website and have found that the student took a bunch of material from there without citation as well. This often is not intentional malicious plagiarism, however, but merely sloppiness. If a paper seems eerily familiar, then it just might be because you read it earlier, and another student wrote it, or, like in several cases of mine, that you wrote it yourself. A good reason to require every student to email you a copy of their papers as well. With the advent of google-mail, with search functions, we may want to require that all students send a copy of their paper to one email address that all teachers of a certain course, such as 107, would have access to. This would in effect amount to a paper database which could rid us of the problem of the frat and sorority paper files, where students re-issue old papers which are unsearchable for on the web. 5. Warning signs from outside the paper itself. Know your students. If one seems very dumb, and you can see that a certain paper is beyond them, even though it�s not very good, this of course is an indicator, though a very fallible one. If your course has two or more papers, keep copies of the first batch of papers around (for instance, by making them email you a copy as well), and remember the style of your student�s earlier paper(s). Students tend to plagiarize more often on the later paper(s) in the course rather than the earlier one(s). This is because, when they wrote the first paper, they had no idea that you might mark them down for affirming the consequent, straw-manning, completely misinterpreting a position, or spending a lot of time on the �casual argument� for the existence of God, �Unitarianism vs. Cantism�, or being unable to put a sentence together to save their life. Also, later in the semester students get more desperate as the grade piper prepares to collect, and their method of studying via beer-bonging to the Simpsons didn�t bring them quite the fruits they supposed. Anyways, if the second or third paper is much better than the first or second, you just might be a redneck, or, have a plagiarizer. Another variation of the second or third paper being plagiarized is if the first paper was not fit to wipe your bottom with, and, even though you gave them a chance to re-write, they didn�t, they refused to meet you in office hours to work on their later papers or to seek help on re-writing, and yet the later paper was golden. Some more points about knowing your students. Has your student, who just gave you an excellent, or merely good paper, missed 10 out of 14 weeks of classes? Has the student told you lame excuses in the past, flaked on showing up for appointments, lied about trivial things before, and so on? Does this student really need this class to graduate, keep a scholarship, and so on, but is doing poorly in the course, and shows no genuine desire to put forth the effort needed to do well? More important than catching plagiarizing of course is keeping it from happening in the first place. But, my main emphasis was on catching (since this is what people ask me about), so, I�ll keep this list brief. I do think, though, that enacting these policies has lowered the plagiarism rate. Ways to Avoid Plagiarizing a) Be very clear about the penalties of plagiarizing and what constitutes plagiarizing. Be sure to clarify in both handouts and when you talk about paper-writing in class. b) Make a rule that no papers can have over 33% of their content be either in the form of quotes or paraphrases. [this merely avoids the less pernicious kind of plagiarism] c) Give a copy of your school or department�s academic dishonesty policy to your students, both with your syllabus, and when you hand out essay assignments. d) Require your students to sign a document to hand in with their papers that declares that all the material not cited is their own, and that all paraphrases and quotes are properly cited. e) Require meetings with your students to go over rough drafts. f) Encourage students to meet with you when they have problem with their papers. g) Do not be completely inflexible with deadlines. Sometimes the vague �personal problem� excuses are genuine. There are additional problems that students face other than illness, family emergency, or lacrosse.
Posted by MarkSteen at 3:29 PM | Comments (20) | TrackBack