Metaphilosophical Skepticism and the Teaching of Philosophy

Abstract

There is a tradition in philosophy, certainly in the analytic tradition, and perhaps stretching back to antiquity, in which the teaching of philosophy is thought to require a certain form of neutrality. A philosophy teacher should not take it as a goal of the teaching of philosophy that students be converted to any particular philosophical doctrine, or that they be sustained in any of their preexisting opinions. The point of teaching philosophy is not that students should become theists, ethical cognitivists, libertarians, reductive materialists, nor indeed that they adopt any particular philosophical stance. Instead, the successful teacher of philosophy forces students to think critically about a philosophical position and its competitors. I have, at least implicitly, always taken such a thesis of neutrality to be an orthodox and obvious tenet of the philosophy of teaching philosophy. Nonetheless, I have recently found colleagues, particularly those with passionate religious, political or ethical beliefs, who were in less than full agreement with this “received” tradition of philosophical neutrality. I still wish to maintain my orthodoxy, but can no longer expect other philosophers to agree with it unless the position can be adequately articulated and defended. In order to understand what is at issue, and to answer some sophisticated critics of this received tradition, we must become clearer on the epistemic status of philosophical opinion. I would maintain that the neutrality incumbent on the teaching of philosophy is a consequence of a skepticism with respect to philosophy itself.