Brainstorming a Humanities Course
From idea to syllabus in 20 minutes
Welcome to Tomorrow’s Teaching! My name is Andy, and if you want to know more about me, last week’s post will give you a bit of an introduction to my own history and to this newsletter. It’s right here:
Time savers
As I was preparing this post you’re reading right now, I received a comment from a reader, Heather, who wrote:
I'm a community college instructor teaching ethics in a technology program, as well as technical writing. One of the issues that I run into constantly is that the amount of time and energy and brainspace needed to incorporate new technologies and theories and ways of doing things into one's teaching is continually underestimated by funders and administrators. It's not that I don't want to do new things as funders and administrators are encouraging me to, it's that between class time and prep and marking, I just don't have the capacity to do it, and that never seems to be acknowledged - instructors are just blamed for being unwilling to change.
So yes, discussions of what to do are great, but there also needs to be larger systemic changes in terms of supporting instructors to be able to act on this new education.
And I realised that this was something I hadn’t thought about enough. I am pretty busy myself, with managing Daily Philosophy, this blog, three YouTube channels, a podcast, a full-time job and a family (all in various stages of neglect), but my busy-ness is largely self-inflicted and by choice. Now, reading Heather’s comment I realised that I might have assumed too much about the free time of my readers and their ability to play with AI toys while, at the same time, managing their busy lives. Perhaps then it would be better to focus specifically not only on what is new and cool, but on what is time saving. And the more I thought about it, the more the idea made sense. So thank you, Heather, for your comment and for reminding me that not everyone has the luxury of free time to the same extent that I do.
So here we go today with the first article in a series, in which we will try out how to use AI as teachers. The goal will not be to do anything flashy and impressive to show off to one’s boss, but to explore how we can use AI to improve our own lives and our teaching at the same time.
I feel that often the best use of AI and other technologies in not in the classroom. There is nothing wrong, in my experience, with teaching a traditional class just using a whiteboard and a pen, and it might actually be the best way to relate to one’s students and to engage them to participate as human beings, rather than as users of some teaching machinery.
Instead, I find that the most effective use of new media and AI in teaching may be behind the scenes and outside of the classroom. Creating video material for the students to review at home, recording lectures as podcasts they can listen to on the bike or bus, giving them access to complete, engaging, clear lecture notes that allow them to review all the content of each session on their own terms, utilising an AI assistant that can give them unique, personalised exercises and explanations, and much more.
These things have two desirable properties: First, they improve the effectiveness of the learning process immensely, giving students different ways of accessing the class content, and freeing them from the necessity to pick up the knowledge during the short hours of class contact. Second, they save the instructor a huge amount of time, and remove the necessity to cover every little thing in class. When a wealth of engaging, well-structured learning material is available, the class instruction can afford to occasionally go off on tangents, discussing interesting questions with the students instead of sticking slavishly to a list of content that has to be covered. We will see how to create such materials right here in this newsletter.
Yes, some initial time investment is necessary to create these materials, but here AI can really help and do some of the heavy lifting.
Enough now of the intro. I will be less chatty in the future. In these first posts, you see, I’m still trying to find out for myself where this newsletter will be going, and so I might share a bit more of my thoughts.
Let me know what you think and what you would like to see discussed here!
And now let’s jump in!
Plan Your Course With AI
Today we’ll look at a huge time-saver, which I have tried out myself in real teaching situations in the past year: using AI to help you plan your class for a topic you’ve never taught before.
One great use of ChatGPT (or any other LLM) is to ask it for ideas to structure your content. As an example, let’s say you’re preparing a new class about the Philosophy of Early Modern times and you have never taught that before. But the topic doesn’t really matter. The same would apply for a class on the History of the Peloponnesian War, or an overview of the Philosophy of Mind.
While ChatGPT will not be able to give you real lecture content, it can be very useful in helping you get ideas and topics for your course. Let’s try it.
This post was originally published a year ago, when I was using ChatSonic (which I’m not using any more). For what we are trying to do here, it really does not matter which LLM you use. Primarily, I am forced to use something other than the official OpenAI ChatGPT, because they don’t offer their premium version in China, where I live. Nowadays, I go through Poe (https://poe.com), which gives me access to all popular models from anywhere in the world. If you are, like me, stuck at a place that the large US companies decided not to support, Poe.com may be a solution for you too.
It also does not matter for the moment which version of each model you use. They all change very fast, and new models and versions come out all the time. But the basic way of using them and interacting with them has stayed the same over the past year or two, so just pick any model for this demonstration and we’ll go into the details of the different models and their strengths in future posts.
Getting an overview
Let’s begin by getting an overview of our topic. I’ll put my input in italics, and the program’s reply in normal font but in a quoted block:
Who are the most important philosophers of the early modern period?
Important Philosophers of the Early Modern Period
The early modern period, roughly spanning from the late Renaissance to the end of the 18th century, was a time of great philosophical development. This era saw the transition from medieval scholasticism to the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science.
Let’s pause here for a moment. From this, I can already see that we’re talking about a transition period, and that therefore I will likely have to begin my class with a bit of an overview of medieval scholasticism, perhaps even some basic ideas from ancient Greek thought, and end it with an outlook towards the Enlightenment and modern science. So I get some first ideas about the beginning and the end of my content coverage.
This may seem trivial now, but if I had not had this reminder from the AI, I would have to read multiple pages in a book on philosophy history, or surf around the Internet, in order to extract this information. Having it presented to me like this is already a huge time-saver.
ChatGPT continues:
Here are some of the most influential philosophers from this period:
René Descartes (1596–1650) Contributions: Often referred to as the "Father of Modern Philosophy," Descartes is famous for his dictum "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"). He sought to establish a new basis for knowledge that was independent of the senses, which he distrusted. Works: "Meditations on First Philosophy," "Discourse on the Method"
John Locke (1632–1704) Contributions: Locke is known as the "Father of Liberalism." He postulated the theory of the mind as a "tabula rasa" or blank slate and argued that knowledge is derived from experience and sensory input. Works: "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding," "Two Treatises of Government"
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Contributions: Spinoza developed a monist philosophy, asserting that everything is a manifestation of a single substance, which he called 'God or Nature'. He also worked on ethics and the nature of human beings. Works: "Ethics," "Theologico-Political Treatise"
I won’t quote the whole output, but you get the idea. ChatGPT goes on to list, in the same way, Leibniz, Hobbes, Hume, and Kant.
This is already quite good, and gives me a useful first idea of what my course will need to cover. If you already have some background on the topic, you will notice two things:
First, Berkeley is missing, which is not good.
And second, the ordering of these philosophers is a bit weird. One wouldn’t jump from Descartes to Locke and then back to Spinoza again, but try to group the Rationalists the Empiricists into separate groups and discuss them one after the other.
The point to remember here is that you’ll almost never get the best answer on the first try. It’s best to try again, reformulating the question in different ways (e.g. “what are the most important philosophers between Descartes and Kant, grouped by similarity of their main ideas?”) to see if you’ll get something better. In this case, I specifically asked a follow-up question about Berkeley, and the LLM gave me the requested information:
What about Berkeley?
George Berkeley (1685–1753) Contributions: George Berkeley was an Irish philosopher who developed a form of idealism that came to be known as "Berkeleian idealism" or "immaterialism." He argued against materialism, positing that reality consists only of minds and their ideas; matter does not exist independently of perception. "Esse est percipi" or "to be is to be perceived" encapsulates his philosophy. [...]
Get more details
So now we already have a list of thinkers and an intro and end for our class. Let’s see if we can get more details about the individual philosophers:
Give me a summary of the most important ideas of Spinoza in five bullet points.
Key Ideas of Baruch Spinoza
Monism: Spinoza rejected the dualistic view of Descartes and posited that there is only one substance in the universe, which he called 'God or Nature'. Everything that exists is an aspect of this single substance.
Pantheism: Spinoza's identification of God with nature led him to pantheism, the belief that God is not a transcendent creator but is identical with the natural world. This was a radical departure from traditional religious views of the time.
Ethical Life through Knowledge: Spinoza believed that living an ethical life is based on the pursuit of knowledge. By understanding the universe, we align ourselves with the rational order of nature, leading to virtue and happiness.
Determinism: He argued that everything in nature, including human behavior, is fully determined by causal chains. Free will is an illusion; however, we can achieve freedom through understanding these causalities.
Conatus (Striving): Spinoza introduced the concept of 'conatus', which is the innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself. This self-preservation principle is fundamental to his understanding of life and ethics.
This is quite good — and again, notice how much time this saves me over having to read something like Russell’s History of Western Philosophy or even only the Wikipedia article on Spinoza. Of course, eventually one will have to read both Spinoza himself and a couple of books on his philosophy before one can teach this class — but this should not be necessary just in order to be able to create a syllabus for the class. When I’m still on my summer holiday, long before the term begins, I want to be able to put together a plan that will guide me on my later reading and that will give me a structure to build my course around. And this is exactly what we are doing here.
Grouping the information
As I said earlier, the list of philosophers we got from ChatGPT is not sorted very well. Let’s try to get it organised:
How can we group these thinkers into thematic groups?
ChatGPT is pretty good at organising things.
Grouping Early Modern Philosophers Thematically
Early modern philosophers can be categorized based on the central themes and philosophical domains they primarily contributed to. Here are some thematic groups:
Rationalism
Philosophers who emphasize the role of reason and innate knowledge in the acquisition of knowledge.
René Descartes: Advocated for methodological skepticism and rationalist epistemology.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Proposed that knowledge arises from innate ideas and logical reasoning.
Baruch Spinoza: Emphasized logical deductive reasoning and the idea that understanding the universe through reason leads to ethical living.
Empiricism
Philosophers who emphasize sensory experience as the primary source of knowledge.
John Locke: Introduced the idea of the mind as a "tabula rasa" and emphasized the role of experience.
George Berkeley: Advocated for idealism, claiming that existence is fundamentally tied to perception.
David Hume: Questioned causation and the self, emphasizing empirical skepticism and the limits of knowledge.
... and so on. ChatGPT offers further the categories “Political Philosophy,” “Metaphysics and Ethics,” “Epistemology,” and “Science and Methodology.” Depending on your interests, you may want to use only a subset of these categories, or all of them, grouping your sessions around themes rather than philosophers.
A syllabus for our course
Finally, we will need a syllabus, a content timeline for our course. Again, ChatGPT can save us a lot of time:
Now arrange these thinkers into a syllabus for a university class. Order them in the order in which they should be discussed, so that every lecture can build upon the previous one. Create 14 lectures. The most important thinkers can have two lectures. Give me a few sentences of description about every lecture.
Observe how we have to be specific to get the best results. You have to mention that it is for a university class, how many lectures you want, how to order them, and so on. The more details you specify, the better the result will generally be. Here is what we get:
University Course Syllabus: Early Modern Philosophy
Lecture 1: Introduction to Early Modern Philosophy
Content: Overview of the historical and intellectual context of the early modern period. Discussion of the shift from medieval to modern philosophy, the rise of science, and the key philosophical questions.
Lecture 2: The Rationalist Foundation - René Descartes (Part 1)
Content: Examination of the life and work of René Descartes. An in-depth look at Cartesian doubt, the cogito argument, and the quest for certain knowledge.
Lecture 3: The Rationalist Foundation - René Descartes (Part 2)
Content: Continuation of Descartes' philosophy focusing on mind-body dualism, ontological argument for the existence of God, and his contributions to epistemology.
...
Lecture 14: Concluding Reflections and the Enlightenment
Content: Review of the main ideas discussed in the course, their interconnections, and their contributions to the Enlightenment. Reflection on the legacy of early modern philosophy and its influence on modern thought.
I cut out the middle part of that, but you get the idea. Probably the result will not be directly usable without tweaking and rewriting, but you should not expect that from today’s AI. It is best to see this whole process as brainstorming, as creating additional ideas, and not as something that will do your work for you.
And there you have it! Your draft course outline and lecture plan for a class on Early Modern Philosophy. Now you can go and fill in the blanks, but at least you have something to begin with. This took about half an hour (excluding the Spinoza fact sheet), but it would have taken me more like half a week if I tried to do it by hand, scanning all the sources and trying to find the individual philosophers’ information online.
Also, if one does this kind of thing manually, one is never sure that nothing important got left out accidentally. With AI, especially if you ask it multiple times, it is very likely that you will get a good coverage of the topic. This is, after all, what GPT systems are good at: giving you the most probable information on the topic you are asking about, the most mainstream data points. And this is precisely what we want when we brainstorm a new course from scratch.
I hope that this was useful! I’d be very grateful for any feedback you may have. Just write me in the comments, or you can also reply to this email if you don’t want to post your comment publicly.
Thank you for reading and see you next week!
— Andy
