Philosophy
fromApaonline
1 week agoAPA Member Interview, Eva Dadlez
Aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology drive a lifelong philosophical focus sparked by a transformative graduate course.
My dad (PhD, Edinburgh) was teaching Bible, theology, and church history courses in a small Christian college that needed a philosophy teacher. They drafted him to fill the gap, so he took some summer courses at GWU and UC-Boulder to get up to speed. The family accompanied him on these trips, and I began to pick up on intriguing references to "dialectical materialism," "John Dewey," etc. I admired my dad,
Last year, during the Central APA, I was teaching at an institution that no longer had a philosophy major. In my Modern Philosophy class we had the unique opportunity to join a public session at the APA. None of these students could be philosophy majors at this institution even if they wanted. Yet, thanks to the 2+1 program, they could participate in the ISEE public panel on Indigenous Environmental Ethics.
The original idea was to run an actual D&D campaign over the course of the semester, with students encountering structured philosophical problems along the way-an in-game trolley problem, a famous sorcerer fatally entwined with the body of an innocent townsperson, and so on. I loved the immersive potential of that approach because it seemed like a way to give students a sense of having a personal stake in the matter, even while considering the rather fanciful conditions that arise in philosophical thought experiments.