Welcome back to the new thinkery. I'm David Barr with me as always is my best friend, Alex, for you. How are you Alex? It's good.
And with me, as always, is my middling friend David Barr. Yes. And Greg, how are you? My other best friend.
How's it going? I thought I was just going to be in Hello, Greg. I'm doing well. Come to July from the World Head Quarters.
Nice people. Nice to be with you guys tonight. Third episode in a row. Greg reminds us that he is broadcasting from the World Head Quarters and nice people.
Could you what kind of psychology is involved in a town that brags about being merely nice? That's good. You know what I mean? Like, it's pride, but not pride in some great accomplishment.
It's pride in what holding doors, you know? Well, I got that town beating. Wiping your mouth before taking a drink of your water. So I once committed us a series of crimes, and I was sent to live in Tikal, Illinois for a number of years.
And their motto is home of barbed wire, because the inventor of barbed wire. He made me choke on my drink. Yeah. Also, birthplace of truth.
Yes, it's true. It's true. Also birthplace of Cindy Crawford. Really?
Yeah. Whatever. Well, actually related to that topic, actually, Cindy Crawford, weren't you just, I feel like you had a mole story. I do have a mole story.
Thank you for reminding me. It's transition, Greg. Oh, that's good, Greg. That's great.
No, no. Yeah, it's a good segue. For listeners who are younger than Greg, Cindy Crawford was one of the original, the term supermodel, really started with her generation. She was famous for a mole.
And Greg was already 40 when Cindy was starting her career in the 80s. He remembers all of this with great, great vividness. But before we get started, I'd be remiss if I didn't thank our producer, Jake, the Canon, Gannon. And also our donors.
It's been touching for all of us to have received the donations over these past few weeks. It will allow us to continue to record this year. And we're setting aside a little pool to up our mics. And this is one thing we want to broadcast to you in pristine quality.
So we just want to say thanks so much from all three of us. Yeah, since it's a lot. Yeah, thank you. Yeah.
Tumbling, really. Yeah. And also for I forget, visit us at the new Thinkery, or at thenewthinkery on Twitter, thenewthinkery.com, for the website, which will try to spruce up also with funds. And I think we have a few more things that I always forget them.
Just everything is the new Thinkery. Thenewthinkery at gmail.com Facebook slash the new thinkery. Yeah. Yeah.
Good. OK, quickly, the mall story. Before we turn to the topic of today's episode, which is teaching, teaching political philosophy, but teaching simply, which is going to be tremendous fun for me as I listen along with people at home to your Alex and Greg. So kind of keeping with these adventures in animal land, I'm back home now in Montgomery County.
We've already had the issue with the hawk. And now I'm having issues with moles. But it's in my yard. And if you've ever had a mole infestation, the ground becomes soft, your yard, and the grass starts to die.
If you've seen the movie, Caddy Shack, Bill Murray's half-brain dead party animal character is always trying to use explosives to kill moles that are tearing up his golf course. So I'm at that point, psychologically, just how upset I am at the moles of my yard. So I hired this pest control guy. And he's a granola type.
And he has no problem killing bugs. But I guess if it comes to moles and things that are that you can hold in your hand that are warm with an appreciable heartbeat, with eyebrows. With eyebrows, I always humanize animals. Bugs and fish don't have eyebrows.
That's why they're the ones people will let go. But I also suspect that this guy has a, he smokes weed all day. So it's like, look, you're going to take care of my mole problem. Then you would buy a mole.
Who could we just say that? It's just because he has an aroma about him. And maybe he's high off that pesticide. You don't know.
That's a better high, probably. But don't tell him. Sorry, sorry. He's not hearing enough issues.
So I said, listen, do you want to help me get rid of my mole problem or not hire another exterminator? Because yeah, yeah, yeah, fine. So he starts out with these gummies. They look like gummy worms that you would eat from the store.
He put them underground. And the whole idea is that the mole eats the gummy. It goes off somewhere to die. That's fine.
Except they weren't dying. And so every week he'd come back and get charged every weekend. $65. I hope he's not listening to this.
But I'm like, listen, what's going on? Because David, you have a tremendous infestation. It's going to take a lot of gummies. There are hundreds of them.
What the hell is going on? Listen, I don't have all this money. So we really need to switch our strategies. It goes, look, I haven't done this in a decade.
But there are special traps that you can set metal traps that you can set throughout your yards. And the mole tunnels, they're called runways. You find a runway, you set a metal trap that once the mole passes or brushes it, trips something, a spike will descend with great rapidity and spike the mole through the body and kill it dead. I said, that's tremendous.
I want a lot of those. True tremendous. I want my yard. So my front yard has all of these metal sticks.
But he feels very poorly about it. And he didn't want to do it. But that's where we are. And when I see a trap fall down, I know a mole has gone on to the afterlife.
You know, if you believe in that? Is that the end of the story? Well, next week, I'll tell you how many I can. OK, all right.
Yeah. It was an extended metaphor for how Alex Freet teaches his classes, by the way. I hope you can all put these together. That's good.
Yes, I murder the blind moles. David, you mentioned before I had this nice story about moles in your house. I think we should have heard the story before we let that be taped. Yeah, that's true.
Sorry, was that bad? That's OK. By the way, we have several animal death stories now. That is a thing.
Well, look, next week, the cat. I'll give you the count. I'll give you the body count. Yeah.
The cat rolls. Cats aren't real. I'm the only one not showing animals here. Yeah.
And you were still like to save an animal recently. Yeah. Yes, yes, my dog. That was a few months ago.
Yeah. When you're my age, a few months, I've seen the reason. That's right. So listen, guys, Greg isn't that old at all.
And he can bench 300 pounds, which is amazing since he's 60. So today we're going to talk about teaching later. So teaching. So Alex, you taught today, right?
Today is all about classes today. 24th, you started class. How was it? What did you look like?
Well, I had a mask on, which is weird. I was going to go in and I thought I has Matt's suit as a joke when this whole coronavirus thing started. I thought maybe I'll wear that into class. I thought that was maybe too flipping an attitude.
But I wore a mask. And I didn't think about this. But you basically have to shout into the mask. And after teaching for three hours a day, my voice is already pretty gravelly.
Probably here it's worse than usual. But you're just screaming into a mask and you're sweating into a mask. And you're just your whole front of your face feels disgusting as you're yelling at your students through it. And I have to yell at my students to yell through their masks because they're muffled.
And the one thing I'm hoping is that all this tension, wearing masks all the time being stuck in your home and not being able to live a normal life at least makes the few hours a week or together worthwhile to see. But I thought it was a successful first day. All things considered. It's just good to be back in the classroom after having been online this summer and the latter half of the spring.
And when do you start, Greg? I think it starts next week, Greg. Yeah, we started out week from today. In first place as well.
Yeah. And I had two classes in person and I'm teaching one master's class that's online. I had my first meetings today where I had to go talk to current people. Five minute talk and the mask was quite unstoppable.
Well, what's the name? Look, Greg, it's because when you're addressing the AARP chapter, this guy's there. David, David, you know with Greg teaching, there's going to be a lot of teaching remotely or remotely teaching, Joe. Yeah, I know.
Oh, geez. That's not easy. Yeah. That's your sense of humor.
That's my joke. Oh, oh, all right. Listen, to turn to the subject today, I'll let you in. Alex, kick it off.
I want to pay you both a compliment. I mean, this sincerely. I've seen you both teach in person. In your both tremendous teachers, you have this ability to take very complex things and kind of translate them into a common sense everyday concepts digestible intellectually for students.
And so I want to talk about teaching but also teaching political philosophy. So Alex, kick it off, man. Yeah, go for it. Just a small point.
There was an art to being able to explain to complex things to maybe people that aren't familiar with the first time. And I don't know. I taught for several years at Moritz State University, which is a regional comprehensive college and Appalachian, the Floodles of the Appalachian Islands. It's an excellent student, some of the best students I've ever had, but also at the service university.
And so there were some bunch of kids. I'd say 23% of the kids were pretty poorly prepared for college. And I think teaching, having to teach to some kids, my first semester there, I taught a class for 75 students in the department really insisted I teach political policy, I thought it was a stake. I thought it was a student of all the text.
Again, my first lecture is 75 students. Only like 75. You look out of the sea of people. I was like, I'm not a kid in the back.
I was paying attention to my questions. Only one kid. The end of the first class he comes up and says, Mr. and I have to drop your class.
And I said, why? He said, I didn't understand anything you were saying. And I was like, oh my God, the one kid that I thought I was saying. So the only point is like, I think being compelled to be in a situation to teach difficult text to people who have no prior relationship with it, I think that really helped me to realize, okay, I need to break this down and just do it at the simple level.
What's the result about? It's just about justice. What's the right thing to do? I know it's in a different direction.
But I mean, it's actually a way to start. That's a good point. I thought you were going to say your student asked you to watch their cat. But I'm in a similar situation where I teach in this program where you discover humanities texts and social science texts for engineering students.
So a lot of them, they're very smart. They're also by large, extremely disciplined, but they don't really have a relationship with the humanities yet. Some of them have studied some stuff and whether double majors or I have one student this semester who already has an undergraduate degree in philosophy. And so he's got that background.
Those students in a way kind of get in the way, I wish they weren't there, I'm kidding, of course. But you know, they, you know, working with these students who have not been exposed to this stuff. And it's a challenge to get them started. That said, you know, I think students respond better to a challenge than they do to something that's watered down.
So even with first time students, I'll throw them into a difficult text and make them work their way through it and hope they start getting their bearings and they go through it with greater confidence as we go through the course and they get a greater sense of what they're actually capable of. But Greg, I absolutely sympathize. There is always this challenge of getting students on board that first time. I think that's a good point.
And I'll just say for my, you know, like I read very slowly, I work through text very slowly and so I learned to read books. And so I guess a lot of times I lost the book and I'll just have to step back and ask myself like, what's going on? And just reworing myself in that way. And I find that talking that reworancing back out loud to students can be helpful.
What are we doing here? What's this book about? I think that's helpful. Yeah, that always happens like two thirds of the way through a book, especially if you're doing one text or just two or three texts in a semester.
You start realizing, oh, while we're really doing some work on this passage, well, we don't necessarily know how it fits into the whole and you have to do these sort of big picture. You can kind of go backwards a few steps, but it's not the same as trying to get a grip of the whole work. So how do you, so Greg, you said a few minutes ago that at Morehead, you kind of corrected your teaching style. Did you, do you or Alex consciously have models?
I know that we've each, the three of us have shared teachers. So we have some of the same models, but do you find yourself consciously trying to emulate them or I think you bring your own flavor to it, but kind of, what do you do? So yeah, no question. I mean, look, almost anything I do well in life is copying someone who I saw do something well before me.
So yeah, I mean, one of my undergraduate professors was a guy named Bob Bartlett, who, you know, he's a professor at Boston College now. He did some really excellent things that I copied, a guy named Gene Miller, who was a professor of mine at University of Georgia. He did some things that I copy. And then of course, a lot of work, a mutual professor.
Some of the ways that they ask questions, even some of the handmeners, since I've noticed I moved my hands the way that I moved his hands when we talked. That's weird, but, but the infamous Butterworth jazz hands, right? Yeah, exactly. What I'd offer I'd really mean.
So some of that, I mean, I also, look, I remember, I won't name names, but I remember. So I also like avoid doing things that I see bad professors do. I can remember being in some classes, right? I thought, Oh God, I'll never do that.
That was a disaster. Like with Benjamin Barber? No, no, no, actually, he's not. No, no, no, actually, he's not.
He's not. He's not a part of was an excellent professor. He was a professor, minded, he was a Maryland. No, he's a professor, not teacher, David.
That's right. I didn't mean any slight. That's good. Yeah.
Yeah. I was a genius. He was in the Clinton administration. I was also an advisor to other states around the world.
That's right. Yes. Yes, I'm sure he wouldn't want that widely broadcast, but he did have some relations to Gaddafi and Olmerkadei. It's a true story.
What was the guy at Hillsdale? Paul Ray? Paul Ray writes something about this. Anyway, I think he was sort of sick.
But the point is, so Barbara, for all of his virtues, Barbara, once semester we read all of Rousseau with him. My gosh. And on the one hand, I thought, okay, I learned a lot, but I don't either. I thought I can't ever.
I don't want to teach class like that. So the models, what are some of the things I learned? I learned to go through texts slowly with undergraduates. I learned to do short readings.
So typically I sign for philosophy. I typically sign about 20 pages for class, no more, because it's dense and I want them to have read. I learned from Bob Bartlett to give short reading quizzes. That's always seem to be super helpful.
My students actually learned this from the rest of my research. I was talking about class by saying it's a beautiful day in Echelo and they all have grown because they know that little phrase means it's coming. So I mean, the other stuff I've learned from you guys, mixing in humor, so being self-deprecating. I tell stories about myself.
I told semester I told students that I can read all of them. David, David told you to be self-defecating. I think he'll... He'll have his own idea.
My age. So once semester I told students I don't drink, I sometimes would play an active class like I'm not where I really am. And the student saw me out at a restaurant having a wine spritzer and said, Mr. Right.
I thought you didn't drink. And I said, how did you... I thought it was so obvious that nothing I said was true in class. So Greg, that's a very bizarre kind of thing you're doing.
It's a very bizarre thing. Well, there's a bit of a dog. What is the purpose of lying rambently about your personal life? Yeah, for no reason.
Do you guys... I like all kinds of things. Yeah. So Alex, do you think, Greg, too, does the text then impose a certain kind of tempo to the class or rather a structure on the class?
So if you were teaching Plato, you're going to only assign 20 pages versus if you were teaching, let's say, the local idiot down the street, Thomas Friedman, you know, in one of his books, you could assign say 500 pages because it's stupid. I guess I'm talking too much about it. But Alex, I think it's only really taught philosophy. I've taught American politics or national relations, politics in the least.
Well, Alex is taught film. Oh, right. Well, all my courses have been in philosophy departments. Oh, I see.
But yeah, I know, I've taught philosophy and acts, which is, frankly, you can use that for anything. But no, Greg, go on. But just a small point there is, yeah, David, when I'm teaching, I taught class on learning at least, and I would assign, you know, once it was once a week class, I would assign a couple of times because it was more about relaying information than about any sort of stuff. Yeah.
But even there, we're trying to mix in classes where we read primary texts of quits over sayi or something like this or alafkani who was a Middle Eastern modernist or liberal. And so then it's sort of my general rule of thumb is the more serious to think or the less fewer pages I signed. That's right. Yeah.
I mean, so two models I've had for teachers was one of my graduate advisor who, you know, Rhonda Burger, her talent was to approach a text in a detailed way and just raise questions. These questions inevitably, I think, linked up, but the questions really stick with you if you read a text. Another thought about teaching specifically if we're going to teach, you know, a dialogue by Plato was my first job out of graduate school was at Sarah Lawrence College where I had the privilege for a few years to sit in on courses by Michael Davis. He has a short essay on the single book course, why it's important.
And one of the things he relates is that, well, you know, when you're thinking about your experience, you're thinking about, you know, what's the meaning of courage? I've talked about courage. I've seen courageous actions. I call things courageous.
Other things cowardly. I obviously have some idea and have some single sense of courage that I seem to be invoking unproblematically. What is that sense? Well, teaching a book is similar, right?
A book is a kind of self-evident whole. It's been presented by its author as a complete single thing. Yet it's unity is sometimes not altogether clear. Books have weird turns to us.
They take particularly plays and novels. We're very familiar with that. But also, I think in works of philosophy, we don't necessarily anticipate where a book is going. And I think confronting that question of how a book fits together as a whole is a kind of easy exercise or early exercise in thinking about experience, right?
What it means to reflect on something as a whole. You can teach an entire text and try to tie it together, give them some sense of the whole and the big questions and making sense of the work as a whole and why it might be important to try to figure it out. That's, I think, an important lesson you can impart to. Have you done that on a course on a just a single text?
Yeah, a couple of times. I did a course on Plato's Statesman. Usually I have an introductory reading for like a week or something like that. But I did a course on Plato's Statesman and a course on the Gorgias that way.
I also taught courses on the atetus and the Protagoras, which is just two texts and other courses where we just read maybe. I want just this last fall on the Charmedes and Decarates meditations, Plato's Charmedes and Decarates meditations, both on the relationship between science and self-knowledge. And in that case, you know, you spent five, six weeks on something. You really do get to know the book, you know, like a friend and understand its peculiarities and its problems and get a sense of how, yeah, this does seem to be something.
It does seem to have a coherence. It's elusive, right? That's if you can get students to have that experience, I think you've given them, you know, the best you can in a philosophy. I've done that.
I haven't had a little yet to just eat a whole book in one semester. But usually what I've done is picked one major book to work through and had two or three bit actors during a semester. So the Republic, but then a couple of small pieces, like, I don't know, some of my stuff needs and maybe a short reading from Machiavelli or something like that. But I haven't.
Yeah, go ahead. No, no, no, go, Greg. I was just saying, I mean, I think that Alex, for me, I had to build up capital places I taught at Fire Six universities now. For me, I had to build up capital with people before they let me teach a class that narrow.
And so I've always had a pigeon or shoe horn books into classes. Well, I've done one book as a centerpiece and that's another. I've benefited from a lack of oversight from lazy academics and sort of less. I've had some micromanagers a couple places.
Yeah, as a vibe. But you know, when I was at Sarah Lawrence, for example, I they asked me what do you want to teach. There's no majors there. So you can kind of do whatever you want.
And I taught a course on Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols a little high to go at the end, but it was about 10 weeks on Twilight of the Idols. Something like that. And you really get to dig into it a bit there. Sometimes you have to take liberties, but yeah.
You have a book you've talked several times. I've talked about many times. I think that's one of my favorite books. It's my favorite book by Nietzsche.
But I tend to, I don't know, Greg, what's it like for you? I tend to teach different things semester to semester. If I teach intro to philosophy, I kind of make some adjustments. If I do philosophy and film, I make some adjustments.
But if I'm given free reign, just whatever I want to teach, I tend to switch it up every semester, if not, you know, every year, you know, that might be a little bit more moderate. But, you know, I have freedom at my current position to teach kind of whatever I want in my freshman seminar. And I tend to take that freedom seriously. I don't know.
How is it for you, Greg? Well, someplace I've had some notation opposed on me. But so I teach an introductory political philosophy class. And I have about three or four different instantiations of that that I teach on schedule or rotation.
And even then, I don't do the exact same class when I do, you know, I have a class for example, I teach around the education sires. But the other bit players, I move around. So sometimes it's the prince, maybe sometimes it's the medraggle, play when I give like sometimes it's tokyo, sometimes it's hogs. But no, I'm saying my idea.
I like to change things up. I find it would get stale to teach the same class semester after semester. I have friends who do it. I have colleagues who do it.
I can't. I mean, it sounds awful to me. Could you do that? Same semester after semester teaching the same classes?
So on a related point, what do you guys, what way are you both only teaching undergrads at the moment? What way are undergraduates titillating you intellectually? I mean, seriously speaking. This is Greg's wheelhouse.
Yeah. No, no, no, no jokes aside. Get these days. Because look, it's one thing if you have graduate students that can push back.
I was listening to some Strauss's seminars, the audio files. He's getting peppered with very difficult questions by people who would turn out to be wonderful and deep thinkers in their own right, you know, a decade after these lectures I'm listening to in the late 50s. And so he had to be on his game. Greg, you're teaching, you were teaching undergraduates at a university where many students are, it was a suitcase school sometimes it's referred to.
Not to denigrate. You know what I mean? But students have other considerations like working, which is more than I can say. Consideration of an undergrad.
So what thrill are you getting from teaching that? Is it a debased environment? Or are you still learning in some way? So that's, I mean, so I taught, I taught at a top 15 liberal arts college for three, three, four years.
I taught it for one year in a postdoc at every university and taught. So a top 20 university. I taught at Moritz State, which is a regional college in Kentucky and now at a small liberal arts college in Ohio. You know, the challenges are the same.
I mean, I remember having heard someone say a bout stress. He said, teachers, they're someone smarter than you in the room. And it's always the case. I mean, almost always a student will say something I hadn't had thought of before.
Is that what you're saying to else? No, I was just saying it's very easy for you. It teaches you. You know, it's full of people.
I mean, look, I taught the, I taught the prints two or three dozen times at this point, but I still remember it and wanted this one kid said one thing that sparked an idea in my head that led to one of the biggest insights I've ever had about the prints. And so it's always fun and always challenging. And there are different challenges. I mean, there's, there's intellectual challenges, but there are also moral challenges trying to get people to see things they hadn't seen before.
My first semester teaching here at Ashland, we have something called the Ashland Scholar program. The kids are pretty morally decent and they're good and they tend to be fairly well read. And there's, there's certainly earnest. And everywhere else I talk when I began teaching a class on aerosol, I've had to try very hard to get them to take anything aerosol says seriously.
Maybe he has some wisdom. Maybe he's not just stupid from the past. My very first lecture, Ashland, we don't really like your, by the way, right. We're reading a passage from aerosol and the students just said, well, yeah, that's right.
And I was like, well, this is a unique different challenge. Now I've got to sort of get them to think on the other side of the issue. I think maybe he doesn't have a doubt. That's great.
There are a handful of schools, University of Dallas, you know, Ashland, St. John's College, Hillsdale, where the students are, they're primed in a way to receive that kind of teaching. It's interesting. It's just a pick up on that point, because I think this has been sort of in the background we've been saying, it's remarkable.
Greg, back me up on this or call me an idiot, but it's remarkable how whenever you go to it, when you go to it, you can't do this. I'm sorry. You're not an idiot. You're very smart and handsome.
Thank you, Greg. And you, you don't look at day over 50. Many, many days over 50. So, but you know, when you go to a new institution and you have new students, and it could, it could be a very similar institution.
It could be a regional college like you were at Moorhead. I taught at a regional college out in Pennsylvania for a semester. Even the very fact that these students are from a different area, it's like you have to relearn how to teach again. So, you know, I taught, you know, students that started going to a very kind of artistic and I had to, oh, I can't use math examples anymore.
And then I go out here and it's like, oh, I can use math examples, but that's kind of pandering. I have to use, I have to push them to look at art and stuff like that. And you have to relearn your whole approach. And in a way, that points to the fact that teaching is a kind of teaching at least in a university setting is a kind of imperfect version of what philosophy is supposed to be, a real dialogue.
And how primarily what you need to do is understand your inner locker, understand your audience, right? And how much of your audience can be unpredictable. They change this class to change this semester to semester. It certainly changes institution institution and even more so generation to generation.
And relearning that is I think one of the charms of teaching, one of the humbling aspects of teaching, but it's also one I think the most philosophically interesting aspects of teaching. Yeah, and I don't understand that was excellent by the way. I was like, totally greedy. I know it was.
Yes. David asked the question, like, what do we learn? I mean, you know, if this is correct, I mean, I think that Socrates, I mean, you mentioned the dialectal aspect and how this is like a dialogue. I think one of the reasons Socrates spoke to these people wasn't just their own education book, but he learned speaking to different human types.
And I think that I've learned from it's not it doesn't have to be an intellectually sharp student. I mean, a student with it who can have it inside into other things, just just encountering different types with different experiences or different paths or, you know, I taught at Gettysburg College, which I thought students there would have had a really good scriptural background because it's a huge path of publishing. There's kids that live for anything. And I went down to the Bible belt and these kids, you know, reading a lot and they're like, wait a minute.
That's not what it says. And, you know, Ephesians, chapter six, whatever. Like, yeah, good. So, you know, just the way they can challenge you and they can challenge your own preconceptions by yourself or about books or anything like that.
And I thought David, right? You taught David briefly. Oh, yeah, you did. Yeah.
I don't think it was for credit, but David. He also hit me. And he decided he was responsible about punishment. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Excellent teacher. What had great? Have you taught other things?
Just other disciplines. Yeah. Yeah. Because you said that's the first time you taught political philosophy or was it American politics?
Okay. Okay. Yeah. I mean, you taught Pilates or something.
That's what you were saying. No, no, no. So guys, what are you teaching? Alex, you asked the question to our Twitter followers for the mail bag section.
People have asked some very interesting questions, including the good homies, Seth Root. And also, John Peterson, what we should hit his question. Seth asked like, I think we should send a little more time than usual, but we should go through what we're teaching them. But just tell me what you're teaching in the fall really quick and why.
What's interesting. Greg, you go this time. This is your. Sure.
Nothing too long. with a political thought, which is usually I teach every other semester. I'm teaching the Nicki McKian ethics, but I'm beginning with the playtime dialogue and ending with the playtime dialogue, doing the retagress, the entire ethics and the end with the apology. A veritable stand, which Greg, exactly.
I'm teaching a class, this is actually, I'm going to admit something. I'm teaching a class called Plutivial Redrick, and I am just pilfering Bob Bartlett's syllabus on Plutivial Redrick because he's a friend of mine and I shared with him. He stole his syllabus a month years ago and has made it famous, so I feel no confunction about stealing his back. In that class, we're doing aerosols of redrick.
We're doing a bunch of speeches from American politics. We're also doing speeches from history, Shakespeare, paracles. I'm not making these kinds of things. Oh, yeah.
I also, you have a speech from the O.J. Simpson trial, Johnny Cochrane. That's true. I'm teaching.
You see, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't fit. You must quit. Yeah, I think you have an interesting mix of speeches.
Thanks. Yeah, I mean, we're, you know, like I said, there's some, we're trying to get different times, speeches, courtroom speeches, funeral orations. And the students at the end of the semester, I'm going to ask them to give a speech and to record it and to write a paper on analyzing their own speech, or rhetorical devices, and use that kind of stuff. I've had to do that.
That's not fun. Yeah. We have something called the Magg Road on your National Institute of Art and History, and I'm teaching of course called the American regime. And it's principally focusing on the little thought of John Locke.
Nice. Well, you know, we have a junior seminar that's largely fixed for me. And I've adjusted that a little bit to, you know, to basically, it's kind of a history of at least in my mind, starting from the apology where Socrates presents himself as a kind of new Achilles, a weird Achilles. So to kind of contextualize that, we'll start with the Iliad, try to get a sense of who Achilles was, why he's an interesting hero.
Why is a hero that is on some level or in some aspect of him is able to be appropriated by a philosopher? I think that's kind of intuitive yet Socrates does it, as a matter of fact. We'll read after that some hese it to get a sense of how the understanding of divine providence changed. And then we'll go into the first three books of the Republic to see the critique of the gods and the critique of the heroes.
And then I think get to back to Socrates. And then we'll end with some reflections on Aristotle because I think some passages from Aristotle and human nature because I think Aristotle, if you kind of take his various definitions or various accounts of human nature that he gives across his works, you get a sense of the whole of his thought in a way that you might not be able to if you jumped around to the larger, more theoretical sections, you have these kind of snippets. So I'm really excited for that class. That's kind of the course I was able to design that I'm eager to get into.
Can I ask a small question, but just Alex, if you would tell something that you thought that was a disaster, I hope I don't ever do that again. Business ethics. No, no, Alex, that was so much fun. Are you kidding me?
Do conversations I had with you? I mean, Alex was teaching business ethics, right? He was all like serious in front, but he was party in the back. He called me after class, a bar.
I got this scenario, right? And he's telling the kids, you know, embezzlement is bad. And then he calls me and he's like, it's not so bad. And this is how you can think your way out of it.
Right? So it's like, Alex, all of it is what he's like glommed on from Machiavelli and Plato's family. Isn't that how his family made other money than they embezzled all that stuff from the Persian government that my Mr. Member?
Well, that was 60% of his family. His father was a French banker. Yeah. Yeah.
Then they meet over embezzlement. That sounds right to me, man. I don't know if that's true. Well, you know, Greg, you know, go ahead and make an old joke on me there, buddy.
No, no, no, no, it's not like in the South where everything starts and ends with a family. We were able to do business with others. So, so, you know, blame us. Notice that there was not as denial that his family wealth was created from embezzlement.
Just for the record. No, no, no, but all jokes aside, really quick. There's a serious point behind the business ethics. I did enjoy talking with you about it, but, um, the hardest part of the class was, you mean that class?
I know I did not. I did not. Every time I had to think of a business ethical situation, I could think of nothing else but dumping chemicals upstream from an orphanage. That's the only thing.
Example I had was, so it would be bad to do this because I just didn't want to get into the moral debate. So I just want the news example. But, I mean, it's kind of useful in thinking about, you know, ethical, you know, the reasons in the news. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly right. But it's been largely, you know, I taught two applied ethics was this is so far from what we actually want to talk about. It's actually interesting. Okay.
But I thought two applied ethics course, business ethics and sports ethics. And it's interesting because business ethics, I think that's what you scholarly a term on it, but it just sucks. It sucks so bad. It's so awful.
But sports ethics is interesting because the reason you like sports is not for some self this thing, but there's a kind of theoretical aspect. You're just enjoying excellent sort of performance, right? If you see, you know, a boxer who's really just, you know, keyed in and just knows what they're doing their skills, it's like watching art. And so there's, it's interesting when you read sports ethics, it sounds like basically applied to the air sta, whereas you read business ethics.
It's all about, okay, if you see something that's problematic, who do you report it to? You report it up the line. It's very sort of just institutional. And it's big money.
These, it's really funny, Alex, how you could see that is not the right word, but a shallow the class, you hit the bottom of the pool in that class quickly. As far as what intellectually it has to offer. That's big big money in business schools, man. These are business schools with ethics.
I mean, who are these people teaching it? I apologize. How bad bad the subject matter was. Every day I would just go into class and be like, look, I hate this.
I know it's boring. You have to do this to get your degree. Just work with me here. And I think they appreciate that.
Should we get to some of the questions? Yeah. Can I ask the first one? If this isn't a question for me, it's from, I just, it made me laugh so hard.
Can I ask it? Can I go from? Is this a steps question? I think it's a good question.
This is from Seth Root. And he asks, are there things the teacher should not teach because the light might be too blinding. Seth, I don't think you meant that in the comments. Or not.
Or not. Thank you. Seth, I know you didn't mean that comment. I think it's because it, I'm probably laughing out of, you know, an account of nerves.
But I'm very curious to hear how Alex and Greg answer this question. Greg will say Desod. That's his favorite, but it's his secret teaching. But Greg, I'll let you, I'll let you speak for yourself.
But answer this one seriously. Does this answer? The light, I don't know if I would say the light is too bright, but I would say two times I get into the semester with something I thought was a mistake. I ended this course last year on political economic thought with Marx.
And I don't think I would do that again. Because when I teach anything I teach, I try to teach it very sympathetically that I try to put the best possible or even four at a can. And so I was worried that these kids left thinking I was a Marxist. And then the worst one for me, and here I think it will come to a real disagreement between me and Alex, I once ended the semester with Nietzsche.
And I don't think I would do that again. I have friends. I don't teach him. I have a professor that said that there's always some Lee upholding lobe type student looked at up listeners.
If you don't know the reference and watch the Hitchcock film in the back of the class who just I think that's right. They get it's a little glimmer in their eye. They start wearing black. They can't understand the scare of the men's stuff.
And yeah, no, that's right. I mean, I mean, I teach is very dangerous. I'm not joking about that. I teach Nietzsche.
He can be dangerous. But I also think that there's a way to teach in each of that that emphasizes the philosophic side of him over and against the rhetoric. And I remember I took a course, a graduate course on Nietzsche was on the birth of tragedy and beyond good evil with Richard Valkley when I was at Tulane. And it was a 6,000 level course, which meant that it was open to upper level majors.
And the course was filled, filled to the rafters. There were no rafters in the classroom. It was filled with these impetuous quasi-Nichian boys. They were just brimming, just trying to and Valkley masterfully turned them away, I think, by just making him very philosophic, really engaged with the predominant ideas of the times.
So I think if you can teach Nietzsche, if you teach the right text by Nietzsche, where you can focus in on what exactly, immediately preceding thinkers he's criticizing, how he understands the history of philosophy, the changes of ideas, and why he chooses his rhetoric this way. I think you can get around that, but it's very difficult. I agree. If you're not careful, it can easily run away from you.
Right? That's a grad class too. I was thinking, I assumed his question was more, what should I be careful about teaching an introductory undergraduate class? Can I just do that?
Sorry, I got it. I'm a comic and a series dancer. What's the heiress office at the Lisistrata, where they want to sex-strike? Or is that the B.S.?
I taught that that is the one. I taught that once, and I don't think I would ever teach that again. It is extraordinarily broad. It was quite funny, though.
At one point, I had to look up the Greek word for say it. I don't know if I can say it. It was a d***. And I was like, ah, surely, this is a good installation.
What did you explain for the folks at home? The play is related to the word for leather. That's what I'm doing. So apparently, you know what Greeks made it up.
But I just remember thinking, okay, that's a comic and a series dancer. Alex and I were talking about this and we did play though, actually. I am somewhat reluctant to teach the apology now. I think that it's potentially too radical.
And I've toyed with the idea of teaching it, but not, I don't know if Alice. There's a way to teach it that makes Socrates a hero. I guess I don't do that. Oh, I see that.
Hey, look, man, maybe sometimes you just need to turn on the firehose on people. You don't like lock up the three thinkers. Yeah, I mean, one way the apology, I don't like to teach on its own. I like to teach it with some kind of background.
That's why I'm doing Republic one through three with it. You get the kind of critique of the gods. And so you have a reasonable sense of why people would be annoyed with them, if this sort of thing got out. The apology, I think there's a way to avoid that.
I agree with that. No, no, but what's the danger? I'm unclear. What was I right in suspecting that if you teach it too sympathetically that the students will think, yeah, yeah, of course, Athens should just put this guy to death without.
Oh, I don't think that's the danger at all. Oh, then I misunderstood you. What do you think the danger is out? Well, I don't.
I mean, there's the question of the gods, obviously. I mean, that's what he's been accused of. But I also think, you know, his to take just the most famous line of Plato is the unexamined life is not worth living. It's from the apology.
And on his face, it's so it's so it's so unnobly. It's so lovely. Yeah. Until you realize that he he doesn't think you're living an examined life.
He doesn't think your mom is your dad is. He doesn't think you know, your friends are. In fact, he doesn't think, you know, anybody is. And so this is basically a wholesale indictment of, you know, political life, ordinary human life as we experience it.
So it's basically him saying better, you're better off dead. That's comes off as arrogant. It comes off as elitist, as they like to say. It comes off as very haughty generally.
And I think that's a real challenge in not having students just dismiss them entirely. Whereas if you seem talking to a somewhat ridiculous person like Mina or hippious, somebody with whom you don't sympathize as much as maybe the Athenian juris, you might be more receptive to the sort of thing he's doing. I thought the danger would be because I've had friends that have taught it by trying to get their students to see their liberal minded students to see. Yes, Socrates was guilty of these things, period.
And then you can judge, you know, just how guilty he is. But yes, so he's guilty of contributing the laws of Athens. So he's going to get his punishment. If you really convince him of that, I thought you were going to say that he started adopting a status point of view when it comes to philosophers that are constantly trying to lay bare the conventions that society rests upon.
That liner part of what you said, I think is right now, but look, that he's guilty, I think is already very much against whatever vague notions, students have, Socrates and others, right? He must have been in it, said he must have been unjustly put to death, but that he may actually have been a criminal in the highest regard. So I think Seth wrote lives up to his last name. This was quite a radical question.
So let me, can I pivot to another question? I read some of the other ones. Yeah, I want to help you. Yeah, Peterson is where I was going to help.