Teaching and Learning > DISCOURSE

Teaching Philosophy to Non-Philosophy Students: The Example of Architecture and Town Planning

Author: Nigel Taylor

Journal Title: Discourse

ISSN:

ISSN-L: 1741-4164

Volume: 3

Number: 1

Start page: 41

End page: 52

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1. Introduction

Philosophy is not just taught in philosophy departments, or to students specializing in philosophy. Courses in philosophy are also taught to students of other disciplines, in non-philosophy departments. For example, philosophy often forms part of the curriculum of students of medicine (“medical ethics”), law (“jurisprudence”), the humanities and social sciences (e.g. the philosophy of social science; political philosophy), even architecture and town planning. Are there, then, any general principles which we can identify to guide teachers teaching philosophy to non-philosophy students? Is there anything we can say about what might constitute good (or perhaps helpful) practice in this area? These are the questions which I address in this paper.

In addressing these questions I shall not be drawing on any substantial body of literature about this topic, still less on an established body of “theory”, for there isn’t any. Instead, I shall advance some views and arguments based on my own experience, and my reflections on that experience, of teaching philosophy to non-philosophy students. In particular, though I am a “qualified philosopher”, I have for many years taught courses in philosophy to undergraduate and postgraduate students of town planning and architecture, within a school of planning and architecture. I shall therefore use these disciplines to illustrate what I have to say, although what I advocate about teaching philosophy to students of these disciplines is also, I shall claim, generalisable to other disciplines as well (because of this I shall occasionally illustrate my points with respect to other disciplines).

This paper is organised into two parts. First (in section 2) I describe how I think the relevant subject matter of philosophy is best taught to students of town planning and architecture (and by extension, to other non-philosophy students as well). Second (in section 3), I describe what useful intellectual skills non-philosophy students can gain through studying some philosophy.

Before I come to either of these matters, I should say at the outset that I regard the teaching of philosophy, be it to non-philosophy students or to specialist students of philosophy, as very important. There are some people who seem to think that learning about or “doing” philosophy is of little practical value, however interesting it may otherwise be. I disagree with this view. On the contrary, I regard an education in philosophy as being of great intellectual and practical value, and most of all because of the analytical skills of clear thinking and reasoning which are (or ought to be) developed through the study of philosophy. Specialist philosophy teachers, immersed day-in-day-out in the teaching of these analytical skills, may be apt to lose sight of this. But if one teaches in a context where these basic thinking skills are not repeatedly emphasised in the various courses that students follow—that is, non-philosophy degree programmes—then one can see all the more clearly how valuable—indeed, essential—these skills are. I shall say more about this in section 3 of this paper.

 

2. The teaching of philosophy in other disciplines: subject matter

Quite what aspect of philosophy is taught to non-philosophy students will depend, of course, on the requirements of the “home” or “parent” discipline which the students are studying. On medical courses, for example, it is typically some aspect of ethics; on social science courses some aspect of epistemology or the philosophy of science; and so on. However, whatever the relevant substantive material that is being drawn in from philosophy, I shall here describe two possible approaches to teaching this material, and suggest that the second approach I shall describe is to be preferred to the first.

The first approach (I shall term it Approach 1) is as follows. It is an approach where a teacher teaches his or her students first about the relevant aspect of philosophy just as it might be taught in an introductory course to philosophy students (e.g. ethics, epistemology, the philosophy of science, etc), and then makes some suggestions about how this “bit” of philosophy may be applied to the students’ own discipline. An example would be where a teacher teaching some medical students about medical ethics first teaches these students about moral philosophy (I shall here use this term interchangeably with “ethics”), and then tries to show how different moral positions might be applied in (say) decision-making about the allocation of resources for different kinds of treatments in the health service. Alternatively, a teacher might teach the same medical students about a specific moral position, such as utilitarianism, and then show what kind of decisions and judgements about difficult medical cases might follow from a utilitarian point of view. In the same way, utilitarian ethics might be taught to some students of town planning, who are then shown how this might be applied to (say) evaluating alternative sites for some new development project (such as a new road, a new airport terminal, etc). Certainly, through the use of cost-benefit analysis, utilitarianism has been much used, implicitly if not explicitly, in British urban planning practice (see e.g. Allison 1975, Lichfield 1996).

Now, I don’t say that there is not something to be gained from the approach just described. It is just that I think there is an alternative approach which is better, and potentially less alienating for the students. The problem with Approach 1 is that, whilst it may have great appeal for those students who have, or are predisposed to develop, an interest in philosophy, for students who are not so inclined, and whose prime interest is (naturally enough) their own discipline, “philosophy” can come across as something external to, and thus (for some students) alien to their own discipline. In spite of one’s efforts to demonstrate its relevance by showing how philosophy can be (or even is already, implicitly) applied to the relevant discipline, philosophy can come to be seen as something separate from the main discipline when it is taught as something which first has to be mastered before its lessons are extracted and “applied” (in a “top-down” manner) to the students’ own discipline. Taught in this way, there is the danger that many students do not internalise philosophical thinking or analysis as an integral part of their own discipline or as something which arises naturally within it. And if philosophy is seen in this way as a separate—and separable—activity, many students can come to regard it as something that can be set aside, or “dropped”, once they have passed the necessary (and irksome) exams in the subject. As some students may say about it all: “I’m not very good at philosophy” (some say the same about “theory”), as if “philosophy” is indeed something separate from what their own discipline is “really about”, and hence something which they don’t really need to be competent in their own discipline.

Some qualifications apply to what has just been said. With students who are already pre-disposed to become interested in philosophy (or indeed, for students who are pre-disposed to become interested in whatever they study), the above approach can prove exciting and relevant. And of course, the teacher matters. With a teacher who is excited by philosophical questions, and who conveys this enthusiasm to his or her students whilst bringing out the relevance of philosophy to the students’ discipline, Approach 1 can succeed. However, even with these qualifications in place, I think the approach I shall now describe (call it Approach 2) is preferable because more likely to be effective in internalising the lessons of philosophy.

Approach 2 seeks to teach philosophy to students of another discipline in a way that makes philosophy—or philosophical questions—internal to that discipline, and this because, in almost any reasonably complex discipline or practice, there are philosophical questions which arise which are internal to that discipline or practice (if there are disciplines or practices where such questions don’t arise, then indeed it is not worth teaching philosophy to students of those disciplines). In fact, because the relevant philosophical questions are here internal to whatever discipline is in question, one can approach the teaching of philosophy to students of that discipline indirectly, even surreptitiously, by stealth. Indeed, with this approach it is possible to teach students philosophy without even saying it is “philosophy”, at least until later (when one might say: “by the way, the sorts of questions we have been examining are what we could call ‘philosophical’ questions”). In this way—apart from anything else—the students won’t be initially put off by the word “philosophy”1. But how can this be done?

To answer this, I have first to say something about how I regard philosophy, for the adoption of Approach 2 presupposes a particular view of philosophy.

In my view, the discipline of philosophy is distinguished by two things: first, a certain kind of subject-matter, substantive material, or “content” (or, one might say: certain kinds of substantive questions), and second, by a characteristic method of addressing this content or these questions. As regards the first of these, I take it that philosophy is the examination of ideas and arguments about the most fundamental questions we can ask (e.g. about what we know and how we know it; about how we should live our lives; about the ideal society, and the ideal political system for a society; etc). It has been said that the questions philosophy deals with are very “general”, or more “abstract” questions. Thus Quine once said that: “Philosophy is abstract through being very general. A physicist will tell us about causal connections between events of certain sorts; a biologist will tell us about causal connections between events of other sorts; but the philosopher asks about causal connection in general—what is it for one event to cause another?” (Quine 1978, in Magee 1978, p 143). This is true, but it does not really explain why philosophy is, as Quine puts it, “abstract through being very general”. In my view, it is the fundamental nature of the questions which philosophy asks which generates the generality and abstractness of philosophical enquiry. Thus in the example given by Quine, to speak of causes in physics or biology presupposes a more fundamental question which can be asked (and which, if one is being thorough, one should ask before one proceeds to speak of any particular causes in e.g. physics and biology), which is: “what is a cause?” and (relatedly) “how can we identify a cause?” These latter questions are clearly more fundamental than to ask about this or that particular causal connection (e.g. in physics or biology). And as this example shows, the more fundamental questions are necessarily more general (and hence also more abstract) than the questions a physicist or a biologist examines when they ascribe causal connections to physical or biological phenomena on the presumption that there are such causes in the first place.

Now, if we see philosophy in this way, we can also see how philosophy can be approached internally, as it were, within some other discipline, such as town planning. For in any discipline, fundamental questions can be asked of it or about it. In relation to town planning for example, such questions include the following (I add some supplementary questions in brackets): What is town planning? (Is it one thing or many? Is “planning” a species of “rational decision-making and action”?—and if so, what is “rational” decision-making and action?). What should town planning aim to do? (And if we say, in answer to this, such things as “serve the public interest” or “encourage sustainable development”, then this prompts the further questions: “what is the public interest?”, “what is sustainable development?”). Does the institutionalised activity of town and country planning by the state result in better development outcomes than an unregulated free market system of land development? (And what is it, in any case, for a market to be unregulated? Is there any such thing? Are there alternative forms of capitalist land development? And—for that matter—are there alternative forms of state intervention to plan land development?) Should the state—through the apparatus of the planning system—control the aesthetic form of new buildings? (What, in any case, is the “aesthetic” element of building and environmental experience? Are people’s evaluations of the aesthetic quality of new development entirely subjective, and if so, does this undermine the grounds for planning control over aesthetic matters?). And so on.

These are some of the questions I invite students to examine in courses I teach in the theory and philosophy of urban and environmental planning. They are (in my submission) philosophical questions. Yet they are internal to planning. That they are so is shown by the fact that my own town planning students raise these questions themselves. So these questions are not first derived from philosophy, such that they have first to be explained and understood in that context before being related or applied to town planning. In fact, I can invite students to examine these questions without mentioning the word “philosophy”, or saying that they are addressing “philosophical questions”. Yet in examining these questions, my students (though they be students of town planning and not philosophy) are “doing” philosophy. But the philosophy they are doing is the philosophy of their own discipline, because these questions derive from (a deep questioning of) their own discipline. As I said, any reasonably complex discipline or practice has “its own” philosophical questions.

To be sure, in approaching the study of philosophy in this way one can, and often does, “get to” exactly the same kinds of questions philosophers ask when doing philosophy. For example, in considering what environmental planning should aim at, many planning students volunteer an answer like: “do whatever brings about the greatest possible benefit (or happiness or well-being, etc) to the people in a given area”, and from this one is naturally drawn into an examination of utilitarian moral theory. Similarly, in considering whether town planning results in better outcomes than the market, one is drawn into examining (and comparing) liberal, socialist and conservative political theory. Or, if one asks what might be a “fair” or “just” city or city plan (or what might be a just distribution of environmental goods, such as green parks), one is inevitably drawn into examining alternative theories of justice. But note again: in all these cases, we arrive at the examination of these areas of philosophy from questions about town planning. We don’t presume (as we do in Approach 1) that philosophy is relevant to planning and then examine it first and come to town planning later. Rather, we pose some fundamental questions about planning itself and then find that we are, inevitably, drawn into philosophy, and this because the questions themselves—being fundamental—are philosophical questions.

3. The teaching of philosophy in other disciplines: intellectual skills

I said earlier that I thought that there were two things which distinguished philosophy as a discipline: its subject matter—or the sorts of questions it examined (viz: fundamental questions)—and its characteristic method of addressing this subject matter or these questions. I turn now to its method of analysis. And here I take it as read that what is sometimes called philosophical analysis involves the most thorough-going examination of ideas and arguments that human reason can bring to bear. In this respect, the “fundamentality” of the subject-matter of philosophy (i.e. of the questions which philosophy examines) is mirrored by the “fundamentality” of its method of analysis. There are two major parts to philosophical analysis which I wish to highlight here. First, philosophers are rightly concerned with subjecting to analysis, and from this clarifying, the meaning of ideas and arguments, and this for the plain logical reason that one cannot examine an idea or argument unless one is first clear what that idea or argument is. It is in this context, of course, that philosophers become interested in the analysis of concepts (or at least complex and contested concepts), for these are the basic building blocks of arguments. Second, having clarified the relevant concepts and arguments, philosophy involves the rigorous examination of the claims being made in a given argument (or—if the work of clarification suggests that there are several different versions of some concept or claim—then the examination of these different versions in turn). In particular, we are especially interested in identifying what reasons are or might be adduced to support some position, and then subjecting these reasons to critical examination (and here, of course, philosophy draws on relevant evidence and understanding from other disciplines, and especially relevant sciences).2

All this, I presume, is unexceptional and largely uncontroversial amongst philosophers. What does seem to me to be surprising is that what has just been said is not standard fare in other disciplines too. For really all I have described are the main constituents of clear thinking and reasoning, and—one would have thought—such clear thinking and reasoning should be central to good practice in any discipline. In other words, what I have described as the method of analysis characteristic of philosophy does not seem to me something which is or should be seen as peculiar or unique to philosophy3. In fact, that this has come to be acknowledged can be seen in the emergence over the last twenty years of that generic literature on “critical thinking”, “critical reasoning”, “argument analysis”, etc, and its application in disciplines other than philosophy. As John Shand says in opening his book Arguing Well, he is concerned with presenting “the basic tools and principles of good reasoning in arguments” (Shand 2000 ch 1 p 3), and this because arguing well matters, in general, not just in philosophy. This concern with “critical reasoning” has also been reinforced more recently by the attention being given to the development of generic and/or transferable skills in education. And that these skills of reasoning and argument are “generic” skills is evidenced, again, by the fact that one can speak of and teach these skills without mentioning “philosophy”.4

To return to my main example in this paper: town planners certainly ought to be clear and critical thinkers. For much town planning work is about deliberation and judgement, negotiation and argument, talking and communication (as some planning theorists have come to emphasise over the last twenty years in the literature on “communicative planning theory”; see e.g. Fischer and Forester 1993). Being able to clarify complex situations, ideas and arguments, and critically to assess arguments for or against proposals, is thus central to good planning work. Because of this, in teaching “philosophy” to architects and planners it is especially valuable to draw special attention to, and further develop students’ capacities to think and reason clearly and critically. In other words, it is valuable to teach non-philosophy students what is now fashionably called “critical thinking”, “critical reasoning”, “argument analysis”, etc. Or (to put this another way), it is especially valuable to teach students of architecture and planning (as well as non-philosophy students generally) what I have described here as the characteristic method of philosophy, as distinct from its substantive content. Indeed, I suggest that this is the most valuable, and the most practical, aspect of “philosophy” which non-philosophy students can learn.

I have put this very generally, and in conclusion I shall highlight two areas of analytical thinking, which we associate with philosophy, which are especially valuable in the education of non-philosophy students. Here again I shall illustrate these two areas of analytical thinking in relation to the teaching of philosophy to town planning students. The two areas of thinking concern, respectively, the analysis of complex concepts, and the analysis of arguments.

Under the British system of planning, local planning authorities are required to prepare development plans for their respective areas, and to control development proposals (i.e. applications for planning permission to develop land) by reference to the approved development plan. In both preparing development plans for their areas, and in making decisions about development proposals, local planning authorities typically seek to achieve and reconcile a number of objectives. They will aim, for example, to ensure that new development contributes to the economic development or regeneration of a locality; that new development is aesthetically pleasing (either in itself, or within its particular location or context); that new development is not socially divisive, even that it promotes social cohesion (as it is now called) or social justice (as it used to be called); to ensure that new development is “sustainable” (or more specifically, environmentally or ecologically sustainable); that, overall, the way a particular area is developed is in the public interest (be it the public at large, or the public circumscribed by a particular locality, such as the public of a particular city); etc. Further, in reaching decisions about development local planning authorities seek to ensure that the process of decision-making is as transparent and inclusive—that is, as genuinely democratic—as possible (town planning was one of the first areas of public life in the United Kingdom in which it became a statutory obligation for there to be “public participation” in the preparation of development plans). In the foregoing, all the italicised terms constitute some of the central normative concepts in the theory and practice of town planning. And yet, although what these concepts seek to describe is central to planning practice (they specify what town planning is aiming to do), they are often—indeed generally—used in vague and ambiguous ways. So, on the logical grounds that we cannot aim at something unless we are first reasonably clear what it is we are aiming at, a fundamental discipline which students of planning need to acquire is that of analysing—with a view to clarifying—the meaning of these basic planning concepts.

Once students are drawn into this work of “conceptual analysis” it soon becomes apparent that, with nearly all these complex concepts, there are differing and often rival conceptions of them. There are, for example, different conceptions of what counts as the “aesthetic” component of environmental experience and form, and equally of what counts as “sustainable development”, the “public interest”, “democracy”, even “economic development”. Through examining these concepts more closely and critically, town planning students can therefore come to see more clearly that there is, or can be, debate about the appropriate interpretation of these concepts, and further, that the way these debates are resolved can have a direct effect on the practice of town planning. An example of this, well known in political philosophy, concerns the concept of the public interest. Thus the adoption of a Rousseauesque “common interest” conception of the public interest can result in different planning proposals compared with a “maximising” utilitarian (or “cost-benefit”) view of the public interest. These conceptual disputes—and the conceptual work which underpins them—are therefore not merely academic; they can have a practical bearing on what town planning decisions are actually made, on how town planning is actually (or should be) done.

Speaking of debate brings me to the second area of analytical thinking which is especially valuable for students of town planning and architecture: the analysis of arguments, and in particular, the analysis of the logical form of arguments—of the claims being made, of the reasons given for those claims, and of the logical relationship (if any) between reasons and claims (and especially whether certain claims necessarily follow from the reasons given). Actually, it is surprising how little argument—and especially how little careful and systematic argument—there is in much of the academic literature in town planning or, indeed, in some of the related literature in the social sciences, geography, and the humanities to which student planners are frequently referred. Where arguments are put, they are often advanced in a scrambled form, both conceptually and logically. So, on the grounds that one cannot evaluate an argument until one is first clear what the argument is, one of the most valuable exercises students can practice is to take a piece of text and simply clarify what claims the text is making and what reasons are given to support these claims, and to do this by, as it were, recasting the arguments in something like syllogistic form. In my own experience, this simple exercise comes as a revelation to most non-philosophy students, including postgraduate students. Indeed, in my experience, it is often postgraduate students who find such lessons in elementary logic the greatest revelation (this has led me to wonder about the widespread assumption that, through studying for a degree—any degree—students learn to think).

I have not space here to relate all the other aspects of argument analysis that one can usefully teach to non-specialist philosophy students. But, to sum up, the main lesson to learn (and be taught) is the unexceptional one of valid argument, and the main way to learn it is through practice. As John Shand (2000) has written, the key thing in “arguing well” is to learn to reason well, and this in turn requires the acquisition of an attentiveness to the truth of the premises of arguments and the validity of the inferences made from given premises—in short, an attentiveness to the deductive soundness of arguments. None of this should come as a surprise to philosophers (at least philosophers in the analytical tradition), whose daily work customarily involves the practice of these analytical thinking skills. Yet outside specialist schools of philosophy, in the teaching of non philosophy students, these basic lessons of clear and critical thinking and reasoning cannot be emphasised, or practised, enough. In fact, if students generally were to receive such formal tuition in thinking and reasoning, they might come to agree with John Stuart Mill, who wrote in his autobiography:

My own consciousness and experience ultimately led me to appreciate . . . the value of an early practical familiarity with school logic. I know of nothing, in my education, to which I think myself more indebted for whatever capacity of thinking I have attained. The first intellectual operation in which I arrived at any proficiency, was dissecting a bad argument, and finding in what part the fallacy lay. . . . . I am persuaded that nothing, in modern education, tends so much, when properly used, to form exact thinkers, who attach a precise meaning to words and propositions, and are not imposed on by vague, loose or ambiguous terms. (Mill 1973 ch. 1 p. 13).

Endnotes

  1. Of course, this is unavoidable if a course has the word “philosophy” as part of its title. Also, there are of course students who are attracted by the term.
  2. The brief account of philosophical method given here might suggest that I see philosophy simply as an analytical, and not a creative discipline. No such implication is intended. I take it that it is a legitimate part of philosophy to create new ideas and systems of thought (or “philosophies”), as well as just to analyse them. In Strawson’s (1959) terms, I see it as part of philosophy to engage in “revisionary” as well as “descriptive” metaphysics. It is just that my concern in this section is with its analytical aspect.
  3. Which isn’t to say that the kind of “philosophical analysis” described here is necessarily central to all disciplines. In some (e.g. surgery) the development of relevant scientific understanding and/or practical skill or craft may be more important.
  4. I don’t want to seem to be denigrating or apologising for philosophy, or denying that philosophers have made something of a specialism of developing and employing critical thinking. That may be the case, but however that may be, my point is simply that the skills of clear and critical thinking and reasoning are generic skills, and so of relevance and value to intellectual work generally, not just in “philosophy”, and further, that the term “philosophy” doesn’t have to be mentioned in teaching these skills.

Bibliography

Return to vol. 3 no. 1 index page

This page was originally on the website of The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. It was transfered here following the closure of the Subject Centre at the end of 2011.

 

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The British Association for the Study of Religions
The Religious Studies Project