Part of the point of a college education is to make intellectual demands of students. This is required particularly by the subject I teach, philosophy.

In teaching philosophy courses at Maryland I attempt to provide the sort of atmosphere that students often miss in courses on more cut-and-dried technical material. It's not particularly a competitive atmosphere, but one stressing coordinated group conversation. Though my classes typically don't involve a very heavy burden of reading or written assignments, I expect close analysis of our readings and a back-and-forth ("dialectical") style of summary/discussion during small-group classes and on exams and papers.

Where class size permits, I give students important responsibility for leading the discussion; and where time permits, I provide students with line-by-line analytical comments on exams and papers. In larger courses where discussion is led by TA's this job has to be delegated to others, and the schedule of topics and readings has to be set out formally in advance. However, in the smaller courses that I teach on my own, I often allow some flexibility as to the pace and subjects of the readings.

In another sense, however, my approach is uncompromising: it stresses self-criticism and self-discipline, as required both by the enterprise of philosophy and by intellectual (and personal) growth at the college stage.

My aim is quite simply to make serious students into serious thinkers. I don't maintain a particular philosophic viewpoint in class (though I don't mind saying what mine is) but rather attempt to give the strongest argument for whatever position students seem not to appreciate fully.

I also place important emphasis on the ability to think clearly in writing. I often am struck by the number of students who can express themselves rather well orally but whose ideas become seriously disordered in writing. It's a frustrating problem to work on, since it can't be corrected adequately in the space of a single course; nor are students pleased to have to confront it at the college stage. The best I can do is to insist on taking the problem seriously.

Though I sometimes add recommended side-readings from other traditions to the main material for my courses, my own training is in Western (specifically, Anglo-American) philosophy, and my courses focus on works from that tradition. They typically concentrate on a few selected authors or readings, in the hopes of setting students a task they can handle without relying on secondary sources, despite the difficulty of much philosophic writing.

I don't attempt to deny the limitations and even prejudices of some of the historical figures in the Western tradition; my approach to them is not at all reverential, but rather critical. But criticism of the best sort depends on first understanding the view in question in its own terms. Sometimes, for that matter, these authors can themselves be viewed as representing other cultures, in the sense of forerunners of our current global culture. But it's important to my educational aims that such differences be confronted and studied.

Bertrand Russell once commented that the most important thing to be learned from philosophy is the ability to deal with uncertainty. What students gain from philosophy courses is not necessarily an enlightening body of knowledge but rather the ability to work on intellectually demanding material on their own.

A typical small-group, discussion-oriented philosophy class involves puzzling over complex texts and issues, not necessarily to reach a final conclusion, but more importantly, to sort out relevant positions and arguments and to explore different responses to them. The process can be difficult in the short run, but it's essential to the ultimate purpose of education.