Reminder

Please copy and paste your findings into the wiki.

Also, here's the schedule for the Teaching Certificate I program.

Course Description

The purpose of the proseminar is to initiate you into the world of professional academic philosophy. The course is restricted to incoming graduate students in order to promote an open, collegial atmosphere without the intimidation of more experienced students.

Unlike most proseminars, we will spend a significant amount of time discussing how you set yourself up for a graduate school experience you can be proud of. I want each of you to have continuous awareness of your goal and how to optimize your learning and development.

All of you will work as a team to produce a guide to Brown philosophy graduate school to inform future incoming classes about what they need to do to excel in graduate study. This will involve collecting useful information about the philosophy discipline generally and the Brown department specifically. You will each report back three times on one of the topics you investigated. At the end of the course, I need a single document that constitutes the whole handbook with indication of who did what work.

Every philosophy paper we read will be assigned to one student who will write a 2000-2500 word explanation and criticism/discussion of the paper targeted to a graduate student audience. For any reading assigned to you, your paper needs to be turned in by the end of the Monday previous to the class discussion, so that you have one full day to concentrate on your presentation and any handouts or overheads. In class, you will deliver a 10 minute presentation that explains one argument in the paper that seems to a key issue using any needed philosophical background or contrasts. The entire class will then discuss the material. The goal in presentation is to practice your ability to present an argument efficiently. The goal of discussion is to develop critical skills: listening, reappraising arguments, developing clear examples on the fly, being diplomatic about disagreements, resisting intimidation by brow-beating know-it-alls, avoiding tangents, etc.

Two of your class presentations will be evaluated by a staff member from the Sheridan Learning Center. Their evaluation will not be a part of the grade, but you are required to be evaluated.

Attendance at the Sheridan lectures that lead to their Teaching Certificate I is required.

On the days when we discuss the non-philosophy books, one of you will be in charge of setting the agenda for the discussion as well as finding two additional supplementary articles or chapters that you think convey useful information or criticism.

You are required to attend every department colloquium. During the following class, we will discuss the mechanics of the speaker’s presentation, how questions were answered and how questions were asked. Make notes of things that occur to you during the colloquium that are worth mentioning: When did you fall asleep? When did you give up and see the talk as pointless or trivial or ill-motivated? Was the main idea clear to you after the talk? What key idea did you remember later? Which diagrams were useful and which confusing?

You are also required to write one new paper, approx. 6000-7000 words, on a topic of your choice. We will all review and criticize the submission twice, and you will rewrite the paper to improve clarity aiming to have it suitable for submission to a journal.