Written Dialogue
July 13, 2024
Back in the 1970s, when I was a junior prof at Wheaton College, I had a bunch of intro to philosophy students each term and a raft of term papers to grade at the end of the course. Some of the students relished the assignment, but many of them struggled to fill out the required page span.
At the time, I was using Richard Purtill’s Philosophically Speaking, comprised of a series of imaginary dialogues on the key topics. (I loved his work, and was pleased to used his Logic for Philosophers in my symbolic logic class.) Though I lectured on the thinkers and their thoughts, I wanted the students to see that philosophy was not just something you said, but also something you did. And dialogue was the way it was done. In this connection, I started assigning some dialogical works by the greats, including, of course, Plato, but also Aquinas (whose “Treatise on Law” in the Summa Theologica is written in an objections-with-answers style), Berkeley (Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous), and Hume (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion).
The natural next step was to import this format to the paper assignment, so I began asking for a one-page starter early in the semester. I’d hand it back in a week with a comment or question at the bottom of the page, and then they’d have a week to come up with a second page. And so on throughout the term. In the end, they’d have a five-pager that we’d constructed together.
I wrote it up for Teaching Philosophy, which ran the piece in 1979. It’s now 2024, and I’m still using it. I’ve been retired from SBTS since 2019, but I’ve had other opportunities to teach, first for Founders Ministries’ Institute of Public Theology in Cape Coral, Florida (most recently, this year, a course in logic and rhetoric) and now for New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho (a year-long colloquium in philosophy, plus four electives). Sure enough, I’ve included written dialogue in a syllabus. And the beat goes on.