Episode 56: Designing A Class On Love, Friendship, Sexual Desire, and Pleasure

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Those of you who listen to me, or read my work, or watch me on YouTube or otherwise interact with me probably know that I teach occasionally, but not reliably you could say, for one of the local universities here in Milwaukee, Marquette University, which is a private Jesuit university. Although, the Jesuits really have very little role, and it’s more or less like most other places, other than having a chapel on campus and things like that.

Now, in the past they had a lot more demand for people to teach philosophy classes, but in recent years the core curriculum, and not just for philosophy, but for theology, for I believe history, certainly for writing and other things, has shrunk somewhat. So there’s less classes.In the past I could count on fairly steady teaching for them, and we’re now in sort of a dance where whenever they need me, they get in touch with me and say, “Hey, can you take these sections?” And then after that, perhaps I don’t teach for another year or two.

So, I got asked early on this summer, which is very unusual, to take on two sections of what they call Foundations of Philosophy. Now, that’s a fancy title for what’s basically an Intro to Philosophy class. It’s the one philosophy class that all of the students on campus are required to take, but it’s not very standardized. As a matter of fact, there is no common reading across the various sections.

There are a few requirements, like you need to teach either some Plato or some Aristotle (in my case, I teach both). You need to teach at least one bit of what they call the Catholic intellectual tradition, which is very wide, so that could include a lot of people. And there’s a few other requirements as well. I don’t know that anyone actually checks on these to make sure that they are being covered in the syllabus, so you’re sort of on the honor system.

And what I’ve done with the class in the past has typically been to have them read primary texts, which we go through fairly closely, and I give them a lot of my own resources: the videos that I create and the associated podcasts, handouts, lesson pages, and we talk about the texts in class. We look at certain sections, we discuss examples, how all of this might actually apply to their own life. And we spend a good bit of time on what you could call ethics, on the philosophy of the human person (or philosophical anthropology), on metaphysics, and on epistemology.

In a semester, we don’t really have too much time to get into too much else, but we look at how different philosophers approach these matters in sometimes very different ways, and sometimes in ways that are influenced by each other or responding to each other. And I try to have them come away with some things they can actually use in their own life, even metaphysical things, you know, like thinking about responsibility and whether their actions are really free and what would conduce to making them more free, all of those sorts of things.

So, oftentimes I’ve done a sort of general “Here’s some key ideas and thinkers and texts in philosophy.” But I also in recent years have been experimenting with a somewhat different structure and orientation to the class. It’s not one that’s completely new because I did this at Marist College with their Intro to Philosophy classes as well, and that is to focus on some classic and contemporary texts and thinkers that deal with, we’ll just say, love, friendship, sexual desire, and pleasure, and things like that, relationships in general.

And so they’ll read texts like Aristotle’s famous treatment of the three kinds of friendship in Nicomachean Ethics books 8 and 9, or Plato’s Symposium, but also some other really interesting things like some of Montaigne’s essays, some contemporary work on, say, sexual relations and desire and pleasure and consent. And so it changes from semester to semester what it is that I include