In which I name-check philosophers like an undergrad at a coffee shop

[the_deep_magic]

I 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.

Comments

[bnasi1.livejournal.com]

To be fair, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle is quiet less complex than that of Marx, Lacan, or Nietzsche. Though what the Ancients said and thought was entirely different from these more modern(!) philosophers. I mean human mind and intellect, have had more time to fully understand their notions. But someone like Nietzsche and Marx and sometimes Lacan have been gravely misunderstood in most aspects. But then again that is what a Literature major thinks not a philosophy major!

Sorry I can not resist a discussion about philosophy or literature! Although I understand the point of this post was not to ask others what they think of these minds of the past!

[the-deep-magic.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there's also the fact that the more modern/contemporary the philosopher, the more centuries of work they're building on, which you have to have read (or at least be somewhat familiar with) in order to understand what they're saying. And I swear, some contemporaries like Lacan and Butler purposefully make their work obscure and difficult to read because they think being impossible to understand makes them smarter than everybody else.

That's my theory, anyway.

[chibinecco.livejournal.com]

First: bwahahaha XD just... all of it XD I used to tutor English, Math (which for some reason included Statistics, thank GOD I'm just a nut-job and happened to study that completely analogously), Biology (which kept including Chemistry, which I SUCK at because the way they organize their equations is utterly BATSHIT. I'm a Math NERD, but I can't make head or tails of chem equations. Let me do it my way, I can tell you the answers, but I get there WAY differently)

My favorite students were one older woman who I was tutoring in math. She could barely subtract 7 from 4, but BOY did she know her English language; and her exact inverse, an older man who could barely read on a third grade level, but was able to solve a simple algebra question from another student using ADVANCED calculus, in his HEAD. The terms he spouted skipped five steps made little sense and gave him the right answer in seconds. That was cool. I've decided it's a left-brain right brain thing.

I've never taken philosophy (took a Soc 101, which was neat though) but I think the weirdest philosophy question I over heard was a pair of friends arguing over which philosopher's beliefs were best represented by the movie Road House. I don't remember who they settled on, sadly.

[the-deep-magic.livejournal.com]

Oh, chemistry. I had the world's worst possible chem teacher in high school, and maybe I would've hated it anyway, but it's a huge part of why I didn't go into the hard sciences. Would you believe that I went the entire year without really understanding what a mole was? I didn't get a satisfactory explanation until I was in physics the next year.

I think the weirdest philosophy question I over heard was a pair of friends arguing over which philosopher's beliefs were best represented by the movie Road House

I've never seen the movie, but I still would've loved to overhear that conversation!

[chibinecco.livejournal.com]

You should see it. It's really good, and extra helping of philosophicality (totes a word nao). I didn't know the names, but the points they were making about the movie's different messages were really good, spot on.

[the-deep-magic.livejournal.com]

Are we talking about the Patrick Swayze movie? Because just from IMDb... it doesn't seem like it would have a whole lot of philosophicality (totally a word) to it.

But, hey, what do I know?

[chibinecco.livejournal.com]

That's the one. It's got this whole Buddhist teachings and balance of Yin and Yang thing going on. It's surprisingly poignant for the surface level subject matter. I highly recommend it.

[the-deep-magic.livejournal.com]

Huh. Aaaaaand... Netflix'd.

[chibinecco.livejournal.com]

*grin* lemme know what you think, wonder if it's on instant... could watch that tonight...

[the-deep-magic.livejournal.com]

Sadly, it is not. I will have to wait for the MAIL. That is so last century.

[chibinecco.livejournal.com]

lol XD will have to DL it or just wait it out, everything will be available digital eventually...

[fatty-fat.livejournal.com]

omg your icon.

philosophy is mind-melting. well, granting that most of what i read came out of france and italy. ancients? not mentioned once, nossir. probably because they weren't specifically addressing current society. and socio-cultural anth is all about that shiznat.

i tried to read 'republic,' once. i think it's still on my kindle. i couldn't make a bit of sense out of it. so congratulations on your understanding, haha.

i bet you totally school all those people at your... school. agent moulder them with your canny insights and enlightened interpretations! or pity them. or both. both is good.

[fatty-fat.livejournal.com]

i totally meant 'mulder' and not any synonym of rotting.

[the-deep-magic.livejournal.com]

I still laugh at that icon.

As for the Republic, the translation makes a huge difference (and usually, the cheaper the edition you buy, the crappier the translation, so if you got it free off the internet, it's probably damn near unintelligible). And learning to read Socratic dialogues should be a class in itself -- it probably took me an entire semester to stop rolling my eyes at the way Plato writes them so that everyone around Socrates is so stupid it's a wonder they remember to breathe.