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Not gonna argue with you, but what philosophy class(es) did you take?

Philosophy is like many, probably most, academic fields with a serious intellectual pedigree. An introductory survey class is invaluable — and should be part of the core curriculum IMHO — provided that it is taught with respect for the canon and intellectual rigor. But the modernists can and often do turn everything they touch into garbage studies.

When I first entered college (sometime prior to the last three ice ages), I intended to study history. But I had graduated from a small town high school of no academic distinction. We had read very little, wrote less, and not until the college bound set ended up in the senior English class did we encounter a teacher who lowered the boom and put us through a full immersion crash course in how to organize and write a paper. We also had senior math and senior science classes intended for the college bound kids, and these were supposedly taught at a college freshman level. Once I passed through the college mill, I concluded that they hit the mark there. A handful of teachers in other years had distinguished themselves as well, but basically the high school was pretty mediocre. These were the ancient days. We only sent about 25 percent of our graduates to college, as the “everybody should go to college thing” was just getting started and hadn’t hit us yet.

Anyhow, I was flipping through the course catalogue with an eye towards my tentative major, areas of personal interest, and distributional requirements. My eye lit on an introductory survey course in the poli sci department, History of Political Philosophy: the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas (as a placeholder for the development of natural law theory, on which so much of the Western tradition stands), Luther and the Reformation, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Hobbes, Locke, the American Founders, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx. I was completely intimidated. I had heard of these people, but aside from Martin Luther and the Reformation issues, I had no grounding in them. I was afraid it would be over my head, but I figured that all this had been part of the canon for a very long time, and if not now, when?

The instructor walked in on the first day, nervous freshmen fidgeting in the room and wondering if they needed to visit drop and add. With no ceremony beyond a “Good morning,” he walked to the chalkboard and wrote, “Why should I obey the law?” He then turned to the class and told us that the course dealt with eternal questions and ideas that are foundational to Western culture. So where to begin? And with that, we were into Plato’s Apology.

It was the single most eye opening and life changing college course I ever took. We spent a month or six weeks on Plato’s Republic; as the instructor noted, in a survey like this, we can only do high altitude thumbnails of most of the texts, but it is useful at the outset to push a little deeper on an important text to get an idea of what kinds of questions arise if one chooses to go beyond the thumbnails and study it more seriously.

But the key thing is that the course was taught with rigor and with respect for the canon as a starting point and through line for the innumerable side trails that go looping off in all directions. I have an uneasy sense that a lot of colleges have abandoned courses like this in favor of comic book level sandbox Marxism, but it is worthwhile for any student to seek out the saving remnant when you can find them. It is also very useful to discover that most of these texts are perfectly accessible. Aquinas does slide into medieval scholastic language, and Hegel and Marx had bad cases of academic jargon disease, but the rest were public intellectuals writing for the well educated laymen of their day. They wrote straightford prose and meant to be understood.

I also have the sense that too many kids walk into an introductory philosophy course over in the philosophy department, and they find that it is a course on logic. That is well and good if done well, but it is probably not the best place for newbies to begin. My own introduction to logic came, again, in Plato’s dialogues, much of which turn on Socrates’ careful attention to the definition of words and the logical structure of arguments in the context of highly charged real world issues. If nothing else, that sort of thing is a wonderful innoculation against Woketard indoctrination, most of which is simply intellectually dishonest. That kind of propaganda would survive ten minutes with Socrates. Which is why the Athenian Woketards executed him.