Bringing Public Reason into the Philosophy Classroom

Abstract

In recent years, ‘philosophy as a way of life’ [PWOL] courses have emerged as an exciting new pedagogical approach. I explain here what a PWOL-course is. In doing so, I argue that the standard method for teaching such courses—what I call the ‘Smorgasbord Model’—presents us with a basic problem: viz., how to enable students in the context of a modern university setting to experience fully what a PWOL is. I propose a solution to this problem by exploring a PWOL that most teachers and students alike already find themselves immersed in, what I describe as political liberalism applied to the context of the university classroom. I show how this overlooked fact not only offers us a novel resource for teaching a PWOL-course. It also helps us as philosophy teachers—in a meta-pedagogical sense—to become more self-reflective about and appreciative of our underlying ethical commitments when teaching philosophy.