Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The one and only textbook I ever tried writing--one actually under contract, too--was finally rejected by the publisher because it was too unconventional. Granted, the manuscript probably sucked. But judging from that experience, as well as a quarter century of looking through boring, uninspiring, or canned textbooks (as well as a quarter century before that enduring them as a student), my conclusion is that textbook publishers want ones that don't veer too much from the received model: schoolmarmish, safe, conventional. Above all, what counts is sales. Funky and innovative texts are high risk.
The one and only textbook I ever tried writing--one actually under contract, too--was finally rejected by the publisher because it was too unconventional.
Yeah, that's what worries me also since there is a definite twist to this one. But I'm hoping that it is enough within the new trend towards "active pedagogy" that it isn't too far out there.
In my experience, nothing works better than something in the form of a dialogue.
Of course, there's the famous Socratic/Platonic example, but for something more modern, the series of dialogues that Bryan Magee released between him and eminent philosophers discussing the work of philosophical luminaries are splendid.
I have never seen philosophy so well distilled than in that format.
I personally preferred classes which assigned actual books to read…you know things you would be proud to display on your bookshelf (as opposed to something that simply advertises that I sat in a Bio 101 class). I used to keep all of my textbooks in case I got curious about something, but I soon realized that the internet could answer most questions so they were not as necessary. Give people something that’s worth keeping, and you have a good textbook.
I’m a big fan of pictures and graphs, but make sure you integrate them into the actual text. I wish Time and Newsweek did that. The articles are so long, and I have trouble finishing them because every time I turn the page I get distracted by all the glitz. I always have to pull myself away and get back to the text.
The best textbook I have ever owned was not for a class at all. It’s a fly tying “text book”. Without boring the pants off anyone…when you tie a fly you have a recipe (the materials used and the procedure). Most fly tying books have just that, but in the procedure they assume a lot of knowledge. Unless you follow the book from start to finish you may not pick up everything. That means you have to tie the flies they want you to, with the materials they require. This book is split horizontally (the pages are literally chopped in half). The patterns and procedure are on the top, the methods are on the bottom. The top section references the bottom, so for each step you turn to a different bottom section to learn how to do it. I doubt that would work for something like a class textbook, but its still a very innovative and unique approach.
i have a question first, SteveG: is this an anthology of readings in the philosophy of science, or a straightfoward textbook, like a "classic questions in the philosophy of science"-type of book?
FWIW:
I'm taking my first MBA class.
There is no textbook.
I've learned more in that class in six weeks than I think I've ever learned in any class.
That might have something to do with the fact that I've not taken a class in 20 years, but it's made it clear to me the textbook isn't the secret to learning.
Examples, examples, examples.
Real-world, practical examples as well as ideal examples. Examples of things going right, and especially examples things going wrong—we learn more from failure than from success.
Separate out the rigor from the introduction. Be accurate in your introduction, but don't put in any fussy detail. I would suggest the following format:
(1) Introduction (with brief inline examples)
(2) Detailed examples that show the broad points
(3) Rigorous treatment
(4) Detailed examples which highlight the subtleties of the rigorous treatment.
BB is right on the money on this one. Examples are key. But when reading the post, I found myself wondering when was the last time I picked up a text book for out of class reading. I don't remember, which tells me something about text books and has me wondering why I keep assigning them. On the other hand, very few academic books are titillating reads. The fact that Nietzsche is the go to "story teller" in philosophy (outside of philosophy through other mediums), tells us something. For starters, stories need a little gossip as found in 19th century Russian novels. This is why I agree with BB, examples are stories and everyone likes good stories. But don't get too Talmudic with your examples. Hair splitting examples sometimes repel one's eyes from the text.
I usually prefer actual source material. Why read what some chump says Hume said when Hume already said it? It seems pointless.
Also, textbooks tend to be too vague. They try to cover a whole lot of material very quickly and succinctly, but tend to raise more questions than give actual answers. A collection of papers is usually much more interesting in that they deal with key points thoroughly, and you can always extrapolate from that. I know in psychology case studies were always more intriguing than the textbook.
I hope this was moderately helpful.
And BB is absolutely right. As the professor (or TA) always says in ENG101: cite specific examples.
Apart from the obvious exception of logic, philosophy doesn't seem to lend itself well to "textbook" treatment. (Unless by "textbook" you just mean "anthology".)
The philosophy textbooks (apart from logic) I've read have been uniformly awful, even when written by talented philosophers.
I think it's because there are so few issues in philosophy (again, apart from logic) that are "settled", i.e. there's little consensus. The textbook author will inevitably sell one side of an issue short, and seeing both sides of the issues is very important in philosophy.
This makes the "dueling essays" approach to teaching philosophy much better.
Sometimes the chump is helpful, as Joseph Campbell was with Joyce.
Every student is going to ask of the source material, "What did he mean by that?". Those that don't ask aren't paying attention, and by the time those that are, don't have to ask, they're ready to teach - in other words, to be the guy who answers the question.
Clearly, there's always the rare example, but those guys would do just as well sitting in the woods reading (or more profitably, sitting around a campfire discussing it with like-minded souls).
I'm indebted to Antonio for steering me to Bryan Magee.
to second what ZZMike said and in reply to CEwing, sometimes having a mediating text is helpful, for instance, i know dreyfus' work on heidegger and taylor's work on hegel have helped me immensely in gaining insight into some extremely difficult philosophy. so, if SteveG could do the same with, say feyerabend, that would be an enormous help.
what examples can you think of that made a textbook successful?
I know in physic classes it helped that the lectures were unintelligible to follow and the professors scorned the weak. I leave it as an exercise for the blogger to show how this responds his post. It follows trivially, of course.
I agree with the comments suggesting diagrams and examples, especially conflicting examples. I do occasionally still look through even textbooks from ten years ago, but mostly for diagrams/schematics/pictures to show friends and family when I'm trying to explain something about biology. While I was taking most of my undergrad classes, though, I used textbooks primarily as backup, to explain the things I didn't understand from class. In grad school, assigned readings were mostly research articles, and some of the best class sessions involved debates around two conflicting papers.
One particular suggestion since this is a philosophy of science text--choose your examples from the widest possible variety of scientific fields. The philosophy of science class I took focussed largely on immunology, which made a lot of the examples somewhat confusing for me (having never studied immunology).
I never had too much trouble with textbooks in terms of understanding when I was an undergrad. My only problem was when the textbook was too easy and either insulted my intelligence (as was the case for some secondary source textbooks that one of my profs used) or used one of those "easy for undergrads to understand" translations of original source material.
I suspect where a lot of students run into trouble is theory #2. They were probably the same ones that were hurrying to do the assigned reading in the campus cafe a half hour before class started...
Will Kymlicka's Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (second edition) http://post.queensu.ca/
~kymlicka...oversecond.html is an excellent textbook which suffers none of the vices mentioned above, so it might be worth a read. I also think that James Rachels Elements of Moral Philosophy is an excellent introduction to moral philosophy.
In both cases what makes these books great is that they are full of examples, written in a way that is easy to understand, and finally that they are not pretending to be neutral, but instead are arguing for a particular position, but are being open and balanced about it.
Cheers
David
I'll second naomi here. Especially in science, many textbooks are out of date by the time they leave the publisher.
There are certainly a lot of good "history of science" books -
but I can't say that about philosophy of science. There is a journal with that name - that might be a good place to dig.
Obviously, getting good at PoS requires a certain amount of scientific literacy. There's a recent book, "The Canon", by Natalie Angier (you may know of her). The book suffers dreadfully from an overweening cuteness of style - possibly understandable given the audience. But she does cover basic areas, which you could appropriate for your own ends.
Somebody should really put together a "Great Books of Western Science" (like Adler's "GB of the Western World). (I leave for another time the discussion of "So what's all that great about Western? Is Eastern chopped liver?")
Seems to me a PoS course should cover the usual Big Questions: How - and What - do we know? Why is there Stuff (as opposed to Nothing)? What does it (science) have to do with me (with us, with anybody and everybody)?
Then the somewhat smaller ones: How did science come about? (Did the Greeks invent it - like they did philosophy (or did they even do that)?
For me, at least, all science is based on mathematics. Socrates said it, and Leonardo was gracious enough to put it in his Notebooks: Let no one enter here who is ignorant of mathematcs. Another thread could refine the question "OK, but how much? Do I need to know curvature tensors to understand the scientific method?".
Maybe you don't have to make graduate-level math a prerequisite to PoS, but it should at least be pointed out regularly that math is a big deal.
Does PoS concern itself only with the beginnings-through-now, or should it worry about what-next? Offhand, I think it should. That inevitably leads to questions of ethics. Science can do X - but should it? Can scientists shift the burden of how their work is used to non-scientist lawmakers?
At this point, I don't know how to differentiate Pos from History of Science. Maybe they're inseparable; maybe a course on one would emphasize that one over the other.
Google tells me that there's a Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana U, and that the "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy" has an entry titled "Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science". But that leads me far afield.
You know the answer to this one already. Make it funny. I mean come on- look at physics. I always did better on the questions about the velocity of a squid launched from a cannon rather than the normal boring nonsense. Examples, pictures, the right words in bold and a few pop culture references (there are books on the philosophic examples inherent to Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer) along with some humor, and you're set.
Eeesh ... some of that was like text bookery in itself.
If your talkin a phil text, my biggest problem has always been " more than one idea in a paragraph ". I kno I kno, it sounds at first reading like I am vaguely retarded and would perhaps be more comfortable in a special needs class than a phil lecture, but at second think some balanced merit.
I feel that no matter how hard a text writer tries, even if they are funky and empathic toward their audience, they always remain a highly qualified specialist in the field of the text being writen.
They are so very comfotable and competent with regards to the ideas they are illustrating, they begin to follow their own stream of consciousness rather than that of the novice reading the text.
Personally, I have found the "For Beginners" (www.writersandreaders.com) series extremely helpful. The approach is blatantly anti-textbook: they're always a combination of comics, quotes, and plain-language commentary/explanation. This format has a way of structuring the reader's experience of the subject matter in just such a way that some familiarity with at least the most basic and relevant themes/questions in a certain field becomes downright inevitable. The key questions and figures are given priority, the differences between their perspectives constitute the narrative thread. I recommend checking them out and seeing what you can glean from their methods. The "For Beginners" books I've specifically encountered and from which I've benefited include "Marx," "Structuralism and Poststructuralism," "Foucault," and "Derrida." Of these, "Structuralism and Poststructuralism" is especially good at introducing its potentially mind-fuckable material in a perfectly comprehensible manner. Used alongside primary texts, a "For Beginners"-esque PoS textbook could be a wonderful teaching asset.
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