Light and Shade in The Classroom (guest post)

“I’m teaching care for their own particular point of view, a disdain for all things ‘vibes’ that aren’t carefully thought out, and a deep understanding of the courage it takes to withdraw from other people for a while, to have braved a thought all on your own.” That’s Robert Wallace, associate professor of philosophy at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly). In the following guest post, he pushes back against a kind of approach to teaching philosophy offered up by one of his colleagues, Daniel Story, in a post here back in February. Professor Wallace is concerned about “the implicit contrast [Story] makes between boring technical philosophy of the sort that an LLM could help you understand and real lived philosophy of the sort you get by reading Anna Karenina on the campus quad alongside your professor and classmates,” and emphasizes that “good thinking has always been, in part, a self-isolating enterprise.” He aims to make a case for the value of that…