How to prepare for tutorial teaching

I. The point of degree-level learning

The point of degree-level learning is understanding, not knowledge, even though you need the latter for the former.

In many ways you gain understanding in philosophy in the same way that an artist or a musician gains an artist's or a musician's understanding: lots and lots of exposure to the art in question, and lots and lots of practice.

In philosophy, this means ongoing study, thought, questioning of yourself and others, and—most importantly—repeated attempts to articulate arguments and positions. If you're not permanently unsatisfied with the state of your understanding and interested in the book, the argument, or the idea that will deepen it, then you're not doing it right! It will take some experimentation to find the way of working that suits you best, but that's roughly the ideal.
 

II. How to think about the tutorial

With respect to any given philosophical topic, the tutorial is almost the very first stage in the development of your thinking—like your first piano lesson. Just as you might be given a piece to try to learn for your first lesson, so you're given a question to try to answer for the tutorial. No one expects you to play the piece perfectly; similarly, no one expects you to give a totally compelling answer to the essay question. But your good-faith efforts constitute material to work with.

In a first piano lesson, your teacher might point out that you're hunching too much, or that you tend to hit the notes too hard when your thumbs play them, or that you haven't noticed the key signature, or that you're not taking account of phrasing. But it would be silly to think that merely pointing these problems out is enough to solve them. And there may be many weeks or months yet of work to be done on the piece you've been given to learn, trying to improve your playing of it in respect of these various problems, until it's really the best it can be in your hands.

Likewise, in the tutorial, your tutor may point out considerations that you've failed to give due weight to in your essay, or places where you've made a fallacious inference, or gaps in your reasoning, or alternative interpretations of a text or example that you've adduced in support of your argument, or logical possibilities that you've mistakenly disregarded. It would be a mistake to think that once you've had these things pointed out to you, your understanding of the relevant topic is complete. On the contrary: you need to practise making the relevant arguments more, now taking into account the points in question. And this will reveal new possibilities, new arguments, maybe lead you to rethink your conclusions. It will make the texts on the reading list more illuminating, too. Even things you read only a couple of days beforehand will disclose new ideas after the tutorial discussion. The tutorial is only the first step.

(Thus, when it comes to revision, I urge you not simply to ‘go over’ your tutorial essays. That's like supposing that all you need to do to play the piano piece perfectly several months later (with no intervening practice) is remind yourself that you hunched, hit the keys too hard with your thumbs, etc. If that's all you do, your performance will probably be no better than it was in the first place.)

On a degree course, you're basically on your own. We supply the questions that motivate the study in the first place, and we direct you to people who have said interesting things in response to those questions. And in the tutorials, you get a big chance per topic to try out your reasoning with someone more experienced in thinking about these questions than you. You also get lots of other chances, because most tutors are happy to receive emailed questions about topics from students who are still thinking about them after the tutorial. Too few students take these chances.

Additionally, across the degree's tutorial teaching as a whole, you get coached in various philosophical techniques, reminded of errors you're prone to make, etc. So, again, it's like learning the piano (or to paint, or to play football, or to do more or less anything involving complex skills): lessons are both opportunities to have your playing of a specific piece scrutinised, and, taken altogether, an extended coaching session in general playing techniques. But ultimately everything turns on your independent pursuit of the discipline in question.

If you think about the tutorial in this way—make good faith efforts to answer the questions you're set, and then use the tutorial to try to improve your independent philosophical thinking on that question and in general— you'll reap rewards. Don't worry about being wrong. It would be strange if you got everything right first time, and most people don't even get things right the tenth time. I'm still getting them wrong several hundreds of times ahead of you.

If, by contrast, you think of your tutorials like an eight-year-old who's being forced to have piano lessons despite never practising, you'll waste your time here.
 

II. How to read for the essay

Your reading and preparation for the essay should not take the following form: you pick a text (maybe the first on the reading list, maybe the shortest, maybe the one it's easiest to find). You read it from start to finish, making notes that are effectively paragraph-by-paragraph summaries. You pick another text. You do the same. You repeat until you've read all the texts on the list or have run out of time. Then you start to write the essay.

That's not a promising way to study. You won't take in much of what you've read, so that even if you do manage to regurgitate bits of it for the essay, you'll have forgotten it again in a week and it will barely add to your understanding of the subject at all.

Instead, read selectively and at a pace suited to your purposes.

First, get a hold of as many of the books/texts on the reading list at once as you can. Find one that seems inviting (or the one that seems the least uninviting), or perhaps the one that seems most likely to answer the essay question directly, and skim read it. Slow down for bits that seem difficult, but even then, don't worry too much unless you really can't get any sense of what's going on. Focus primarily on the part where it comes closest to answering your essay question, and take in other parts insofar as they help you to understand that part, going back and forth between different parts of the text as necessary.

Next, write a short summary for yourself of a provisional answer to the essay question (as well as any supplementary questions on the reading list) and the main reasons/moves underpinning that answer, in light of the reading you've just done.

Then skim another text—preferably one that seems (from its introduction or conclusion) to be addressing some of the main ideas or moves in the one that you've read already, or at least that seems to be saying something very different. Write another short summary, but this time add a line or two explaining to yourself as best you can what the second author would say about the first. If you're not sure, go back into one or both of the texts and read the sections that (as you know from your skimming) would help you to figure that out. If you're still not sure, look at relevant-looking bits of the other texts, or look for a relevant bit of the Stanford Encyclopedia, or email me, or ask one of your peers.

Now, pause and think about which answer you find more compelling, if they conflict, and why; or which seems to offer the stronger argument, if they don't conflict. Even if it's just an intuitive impression at this point, it's good to register that, and perhaps indicate to yourself just which part of the argument gives rise to it. Write a note to yourself setting out your view or impression.

Finally, go onto another text, and repeat until you've used up the time you've allotted.

In doing all this, you're trying to build up a picture of the moves people make to tack from one answer to the question to another. You're not just trying to figure out what people's answers are, but to figure out why they don't accept each other's answers. If you can do that, then you have their reasons, and once you have their reasons, you can compare reasons and decide for yourself which you think are more compelling. If you can't, you'll end up doing what lots of bad undergraduate essays do, which is describe a sequence of positions and then plump for one of them without really justifying the verdict (“Overall, I feel that X is a stronger argument than Y”—never write this!).

At every stage in the process I've just described, you'll be confronted with questions that you can't answer given your reading to date. What would Philosopher 1 say to Philosopher 2 to get him to switch to her position? What consideration or value does she find compelling/attractive that he doesn't? Why doesn't he find it compelling?

When you are confronted with such questions, go back to the text, homing in on relevant sections and reading them more slowly, in order to find out the answers. Don't be satisfied not knowing. One of the reasons you were admitted to study here was that you seemed well endowed with intellectual curiosity. Live up to that!

If you don't have answers to such questions, your essay will have big gaps in it. At the very least, you should acknowledge that you don't know. Then you can say at the relevant point in your essay: “In response to this objection, so-and-so seems simply to insist that not-X. But I can't see why this is plausible. So, I reject the response.” In this way, you are intellectually honest, and you keep open the possibility that someone (your tutorial partners, me, someone you read later) will have spotted a reason that you've missed, which will then slot beautifully into your understanding in a way that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.

Follow the procedure I’ve described, and the document you end up with will work reasonably well as the basis for your essay. You'll need to pick out the parts of it that are required to make a case for a particular answer to your essay question, and of course you'll need to add a bit more structure (including ‘signposting’—that is, sections (e.g. the introduction) and sentences (e.g. at the beginning of a new paragraph) in which you tell your reader what's going on at that point in the essay). But most of the substance of your argument will already be there. So actually producing an essay should be relatively straightforward. You can look at the essay-writing guidelines for more on this.