“I’m teaching care for their own particular point of view, a disdain for all things ‘vibes’ that aren’t carefully thought out, and a deep understanding of the courage it takes to withdraw from other people for a while, to have braved a thought all on your own.” That’s Robert Wallace, associate professor of philosophy at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly). In the following guest post, he pushes back against a kind of approach to teaching philosophy offered up by one of his colleagues, Daniel Story, in a post here back in February. Professor Wallace is concerned about “the implicit contrast [Story] makes between boring technical philosophy of the sort that an LLM could help you understand and real lived philosophy of the sort you get by reading Anna Karenina on the campus quad alongside your professor and classmates,” and emphasizes that “good thinking has always been, in part, a self-isolating enterprise.” He aims to make a case for the value of that loneliness. Light and Shade in The Classroom by Robert Wallace One of my students hurries into my office hours to discuss their term paper on some technical topic in contemporary analytic metaphysics. They accidentally drop a ludicrously heavy book on the floor. It’s Anna Karenina. I’m right down the hall from the purveyor of one truly happy classroom—Daniel Story—and I am lucky enough to count him as a colleague and a friend. He recently wrote a guest post here about his philosophy of love seminar, where the students are genuinely reading Anna Karenina (“alongside several hundred pages of philosophical texts”) despite what the doomsayers suggest about our students’ inability to read. Daniel’s goal in the classroom is caring, embodied pedagogy. He and his students become a community of readers and thinkers. I share all of Daniel’s commitments: his anti-elitism in defense of our students, his insistence that students can and will, perhaps, do the readings, the idea that mutual care and concern are essential values to manifest in the classroom. (I marvel at his dizzying array of references and the warmth of his prose). But what I want to draw attention to is the implicit contrast he makes between boring technical philosophy of the..

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