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the_deep_magicI think I've mentioned this before, but where I work right now is a tutoring center for a variety of subjects, not just a writing center, and I tutor philosophy, too. Well, theoretically. I've had exactly three people come in, two of them today. Which I'm totally okay with, because it gives me paid-homework time (though my boss realized no one was coming in and switched two of my six philosophy hours back to writing) and tutoring in philosophy is really difficult for at least two reasons (other than the fact that I got my philosophy degree seven and a half fucking years ago, holy shit):
1) It's not like there's a standard curriculum, even for the intro courses. And of course everyone teaches the same philosophers differently. In the course of my undergrad and previous grad school, I read the entirety of Plato's Republic four times. Twice I was taught what I guess is the traditional philosophical interpretation, once the ironic Straussian/Allan Bloom interpretation (which happens to be the one I agree the most with, if you're taking notes), and once a classic rhetorical interpretation -- all three are extremely different. Obviously, not all texts lend themselves to that many viewpoints, but odds are pretty damn good the kid isn't going to know which stance the professor takes.
Not only does everyone teach something different, everybody calls it something different. Forget standard terminology. ("I'll take 'the Good' for 500, Alex.") One of the girls who came in was trying to understand the difference between human rights-based ethics and justice-based ethics, or something. Ethics is even one of the areas I'm pretty well-versed in -- I know my Epicureanism from my deontology from my utilitarianism from my virtue ethics -- and I had never heard of what she was talking about. Of course, she didn't have her textbook and wanted me to make sense of her notes, and it was just a disaster.
2) There is no possible way for me to know every philosopher and school of thought -- even philosophy grad students specialize -- and there's not exactly a handy reference book for me to go to. Even the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is the most comprehensive reference I know, is of limited usefulness, and there are exactly zero philosophy resources in the tutoring center. Yes, if someone comes in with a question on most of the Greeks or Descartes or Hume or Hegel or Nietzsche, I'm probably going to be able to help them. If somebody walks in with Wittgenstein or Schopenhauer, I'm not going to be of any use at all. I'd have to read the text, think about it for a while, read some commentaries on the text, think about those for a while, and then I can discuss it. That's how it works.
I also realized, several years after graduating, that my philosophy education was very old school. Literally. Apart what I read for philosophy of mind (which I took while abroad), I think Russell was the most contemporary philosopher I studied in any depth (though my philosophy of language prof might have slipped some Kripke in there). I didn't read a word of Foucault or Lacan or any of the post-modernists until I got to grad school. Note that I'm not complaining, just observing.
It would be helpful if there were other philosophy tutors, but it's just me. I know my Plato and Aristotle backwards and forwards, I'm pretty good with ethics and philosophy of mind, I'm on good terms with Nietzsche, I'm all over Leibniz and his monads, and I understand Kierkegaard just about as well as anybody who isn't actually Kierkegaard can understand Kierkegaard, but even the various other philosophers I've studied, I would need their texts in front of me to be able to explain them and make any kind of sense. And one of the girls who came in today had a paper comparing Marx, Durkheim, and Weber -- none of whom I ever studied in a philosophy course. I just happened to be a sociology minor (and we've been studying Marx and Durkheim in one of my courses that I'm taking now, thank God), so I could help her (though I had to fake it on the Weber a bit).
Well, the upshot of all of this is that criminal justice is... well, I'm not going to say easy, because grad school is not easy, but moving from philosophy to rhet/comp to criminal justice has been a progressive move from the abstract to the concrete. So reading a shit-ton of crim theory? Doesn't faze me in the slightest. When people in my classes complain about the texts being hard to read, I want to hand them anything written by John Locke or Leibniz and laugh at their bitter, frustrated weeping.
I am a very bad person.
1) It's not like there's a standard curriculum, even for the intro courses. And of course everyone teaches the same philosophers differently. In the course of my undergrad and previous grad school, I read the entirety of Plato's Republic four times. Twice I was taught what I guess is the traditional philosophical interpretation, once the ironic Straussian/Allan Bloom interpretation (which happens to be the one I agree the most with, if you're taking notes), and once a classic rhetorical interpretation -- all three are extremely different. Obviously, not all texts lend themselves to that many viewpoints, but odds are pretty damn good the kid isn't going to know which stance the professor takes.
Not only does everyone teach something different, everybody calls it something different. Forget standard terminology. ("I'll take 'the Good' for 500, Alex.") One of the girls who came in was trying to understand the difference between human rights-based ethics and justice-based ethics, or something. Ethics is even one of the areas I'm pretty well-versed in -- I know my Epicureanism from my deontology from my utilitarianism from my virtue ethics -- and I had never heard of what she was talking about. Of course, she didn't have her textbook and wanted me to make sense of her notes, and it was just a disaster.
2) There is no possible way for me to know every philosopher and school of thought -- even philosophy grad students specialize -- and there's not exactly a handy reference book for me to go to. Even the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is the most comprehensive reference I know, is of limited usefulness, and there are exactly zero philosophy resources in the tutoring center. Yes, if someone comes in with a question on most of the Greeks or Descartes or Hume or Hegel or Nietzsche, I'm probably going to be able to help them. If somebody walks in with Wittgenstein or Schopenhauer, I'm not going to be of any use at all. I'd have to read the text, think about it for a while, read some commentaries on the text, think about those for a while, and then I can discuss it. That's how it works.
I also realized, several years after graduating, that my philosophy education was very old school. Literally. Apart what I read for philosophy of mind (which I took while abroad), I think Russell was the most contemporary philosopher I studied in any depth (though my philosophy of language prof might have slipped some Kripke in there). I didn't read a word of Foucault or Lacan or any of the post-modernists until I got to grad school. Note that I'm not complaining, just observing.
It would be helpful if there were other philosophy tutors, but it's just me. I know my Plato and Aristotle backwards and forwards, I'm pretty good with ethics and philosophy of mind, I'm on good terms with Nietzsche, I'm all over Leibniz and his monads, and I understand Kierkegaard just about as well as anybody who isn't actually Kierkegaard can understand Kierkegaard, but even the various other philosophers I've studied, I would need their texts in front of me to be able to explain them and make any kind of sense. And one of the girls who came in today had a paper comparing Marx, Durkheim, and Weber -- none of whom I ever studied in a philosophy course. I just happened to be a sociology minor (and we've been studying Marx and Durkheim in one of my courses that I'm taking now, thank God), so I could help her (though I had to fake it on the Weber a bit).
Well, the upshot of all of this is that criminal justice is... well, I'm not going to say easy, because grad school is not easy, but moving from philosophy to rhet/comp to criminal justice has been a progressive move from the abstract to the concrete. So reading a shit-ton of crim theory? Doesn't faze me in the slightest. When people in my classes complain about the texts being hard to read, I want to hand them anything written by John Locke or Leibniz and laugh at their bitter, frustrated weeping.
I am a very bad person.
