Teaching is often the best and most direct way that philosophers have of improving the world. Providing students with the skills required to negotiate the challenging ethical terrain of the modern world, and to think carefully about their place in it, has the potential to transform their lives. That said, this potential is best realized through a broad, inclusive, and interdisciplinary approach to these questions. As such, I work to integrate insights from across traditions, times, and disciplines into my courses. Underneath all of this is a commitment to helping my students develop the academic and practical skills that will help them achieve a life well-lived.
D.E. Weissglass
Philosopher
Teaching
Teaching Philosophy
Courses Taught
A required course for all Global Health Majors at Duke Kunshan University, this 200-level course focuses on equipping these students with moral tools to deal with the challenges they will face in research, clinical, or policy contexts.
The third common core course at Duke Kunshan University, ‘Ethics, Citizenship, and the Examined Life’ is required of all students and is typically taken in their third year. This course helps students to think deeply about the sort of life they want to live, focusing on practical issues around the sorts of families, careers, and communities of which they want to be a part.
A 300-level elective at Duke Kunshan University, this course is designed to give interested students an opportunity to explore the concept of global justice in context of health care. It is more focused, and goes deeper, than Global Health Ethics, and is a good choice both for those in health-related areas and those in philosophical and political areas interested in health.
A 100-level contemporary introduction to ethics, this course aims to equip students to make and assess moral choices that reflect their values. Students are brought to reflect on their values and to understand how these values connect to their behaviors and their character.
A 100-level course meant to introduce students to philosophy, this course focuses on areas of the greatest practical importance: epistemology, ethics, and politics. As such, it equips students with valuable tools to make sense of their lives, regardless of whether they choose to explore philosophy more deeply. This course focuses on the contemporary context, and engages heavily with current events.
A 100-level course meant to introduce students to philosophy, this course focuses on areas of the greatest practical importance: epistemology, ethics, and politics. As such, it equips students with valuable tools to make sense of their lives, regardless of whether they choose to explore philosophy more deeply. This version of the class focuses on developing these issues in an explicitly historical context, introducing students to major historical philosophers: Laotzu, Confucius, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, etc.
A 100-level course in critical reasoning, this course – taught under the title ‘Introduction to Logic and Science’ – prepares students to understand, analyze, and produce high-quality arguments of various types. Students learn about common fallacies, tools for mapping and evaluating arguments, the differences between arguments of various kinds (e.g., moral, conceptual, empirical), and the foundations of both scientific and non-scientific reasoning.
A 200-level course introducing students to trends in contemporary epistemology. This class covers theories of knowledge and justification, the role of testimony, social epistemology and the sociology of knowledge, etc.
A 300-level elective at Duke Kunshan University, this course focused on the ethical issues associated with the use of nudging to influence behavior.
This course has been deprecated, with key pieces of its content being addressed in an upper level course exploring nudging more broadly.