April 11, 2019, by apycmro

Teaching: It’s Not What You Think It Is! An insight to Philosophy Lectures at the University of Nottingham

Hey soon to be University of Nottingham philosophy students!

Ever wondered what a philosophy lecture at the University of Nottingham might be like? Well we’ve got just the blog post for you!

We sat in on a philosophy lecture discussing Fisher and Tallant’s paper ‘What does it mean to teach?’ and we’re here to tell you what we’ve learnt.

So let’s think about it for a second, what is teaching?

Fisher and Tallant give us two options to start with:

– intentionalism

– internalism

We might say that someone is teaching if they intend to do so, seems pretty straightforward right?

But let’s think about Gilderoy Lockhart’s defence against the dark arts lesson from Harry Potter (hope you’ve brushed up on all of your Harry Potter knowledge!). He intended to teach his class about pixies, but ended up not teaching them anything because they all escaped!

So how about internalism?

Someone is teaching here if there are effective changes in the learner. But there are some lessons where there might be no changes because the content is too hard. Like Professor Slughorn’s potions lessons.

So Fisher and Tallant propose a better concept of teaching; a ‘judgement dependent concept’ of teaching.

This means that someone is teaching if their subject judges them to be doing so (provided that this is within ideal conditions – no drinking on the job!).

Fisher and Tallant argue in their paper that so long as this is the case, we can say that this person is teaching.

Only problem is… this means anything can teach us, even robots. Maths lesson with C-3PO anyone?

Like what you’ve read and ready for the challenge? We look forward to seeing you in September!

Don’t forget to follow the department on twitter to see what they’re up to! @NottsPhilosophy

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share on Google+
• Share on LinkedIn