Peirce, Thirdness and Pedagogy :: Philosophy Education Teaching Learning Papers

Peirce, Thirdness and Pedagogy It is well known that the word pedagogy comes from the Greek paidagogos (teacher, pedagogue) which has the same root as paideia, usually translated "culture." The theme of this congress highlights the hope of many teachers of philosophy, that their teaching and writing has some impact on the culture. In this paper I want to show a connection between a Peircean understanding of persons (as interpreted by Royce) and its implications for how we go about conducting classes in philosophy. This connection is very recent with me, and it has changed my approach to teaching, especially at the "introductory" level. Our line of thought will have three major phases: 1) the Peircean understanding of persons as members of a community of interpretation; 2) its implications for a theory of pedagogy which emphasizes "induction into" more than "introduction to" the subject; and 3) the specific techniques that I have adopted in introductory classes to enact this theory of pedagogy. At the outset I should say that at least half of my teaching is at the introductory level, with classes ranging from 30 to 50 students each. It is these students, most of whom will not take any more philosophy, that I am most concerned about in this paper. How can their one exposure to academic philosophy convince them that it is a vital part of their heritage and a cultural resource that is absolutely necessary to a healthy society? Especially if a course is historically oriented, as ours is by catalogue description, it is easy for students to feel that philosophy is the irrelevant meanderings of dead white males! Good teaching can overcome this in some measure, but I believe that a Peircean understanding of persons can lead us to a theory of pedagogy that directs us towards the kind of classroom practices that will make the experience of philosophy more vital and significant for our students. I. Peirce, Thirdness, and Personhood Every philosophy of education in informed, at least implicitly, by a notion of personhood. Peirce focused more explicitly on epistemological understandings than personhood, but his epistemological writings supplied perspectives which were used by Josiah Royce in his last major work, The Problem of Christianity, to formulate a notion of the self as a member of a "community of interpretation." In his discussion of this concept, Royce was explicit about his debt to Peirce, especially Peirce’s notion of "thirdness.