Plato (already mentioned): In political philosophy, I think good-hearted liberal (in the classic, not the contemporary political sense) students benefit from confronting a worked out political system with authoritarian tendencies. (Hobbes works well here also) Oftentimes students read the Republic, disagree with its conclusions, and can’t figure out why, thus generating cognitive dissonance and teachable moments.

Paul Feyerabend (philosophy of science)

Peter Singer (ethics of life and death, world hunger, etc.)

Judith Thomson’s abortion article

Michael Tooley on infanticide

I realize these aren’t exactly way out of the mainstream, but again, I think their job is not necessarily to articulate the most reasonable or thoughtful position, but to stimulate students to see that there are problems where they might thought there weren’t.

Many of my professors picked readings that addressed issues that were important to them after however many years of graduate study. I think the problem with this is self-evident. Rather than assigning us your favorite book from grad school, just assign your favorite book from college, and use your accumulated smartness to tell us something interesting about it.

That’s a lot of work, Tim; I admire your willingness to commit to it. By contrast, if I find something that works, I stick with it, and only fine tune around the edges. (Though I only have found such for a few of my regular classes; for most of those courses I’m expected to regularly teach, I’m still very much in flux, despite having taught for five years now.) Perhaps this is partly why I think a “canon” is so important when teaching the history of philosophy and political thought–because it allows me to lead my students down a path that is well-worn, with questions and provocations that will reliably catch the eye of many, if not most, attentive readers.

Michael, Tim, could you give a few more specific examples of readings and sources you’ve recently assigned for particular courses, and why? That would be helpful to me in better understanding your point, and perhaps applying it to my field of political theory. I think I’m an fair-to-decent teacher, but I recognize a lot of myself in this thread, and it’s something I’d like to work on improving.

This goes double, by the way, if you’re writing a book for use in the classroom. One of the temptations of scholarly writing is to forestall critiques, plug leaks, and generally render airless the argument. Which of course is another way of saying, you’re writing specifically to kill discussion. It’s better — though hard, very hard, for a trained scholar to do — to run along with your argument and not mind the loose threads — you’ll be writing a more fertile book for enterprising minds.

It might even be true that such a book does scholarly discourse a greater service, by opening avenues for argument rather than shutting them down. So let’s all write for the classroom, and do ourselves a favor in the bargain!

I think this is one of the toughest things that most academics come up against early in their teaching career, and it’s often the thing that separates those who will adapt to teaching and enjoy it and those who will mop until they get back into a research university environment where teaching is minimized and they can largely center their day-to-day activities within the norms of scholarly debate.

The first year you teach, you often try to use the material you’ve just been working with for the past five to seven years as a grad student, and most of it bombs to some degree or another. Some people just bull right past that, ignore it, and try to force the students to adapt to the professor rather than the other way around. If you’re in an institution where you’re also teaching grad students and you’re attending seminars, workshops, conference and so on with great regularity, then you’re getting enough confirmation about that material that you can survive that refusal to adapt. If you’re in a teaching-oriented, undergraduate-only institution, the refusal to adapt gets pretty painful at some point, because your main source of regular feedback about the materials you assign is students.

None of them were entirely persuasive, the first because of my resilient inner narcissist; the second because I had plenty of opportunity to see that the settings (that is, institutions/students) were great at other times; the third — well, in a couple of instances I changed my opinion of a particular piece based on incredulous and/or baffled and/or listless student reactions. But usually I still thought — no, that’s a good article/essay/book chapter. One of the problems I’ve found is that not only are really top works fairly self-contained (as you indicated), but they are self-contained because they are densely, multiply referential in ways that are built into their style and approach, so that you must already be familiar with a broad literature to “get” them.

All of that being said, I think this flips the other way when you step from “top notch” to “shazam!!!”. “Shazam!” pieces, the best of the best, have something for everybody.

but wow, is it hard to design a course that is full of quality, accessible, smart and yet not too-smart work, dotted at intervals with “shazam!” pieces (which are rare in any field). I’m an anthropologist, btw.