I was talking to Andy Egan the other day about strategies for teaching intro philosophy classes. When putting together a syllabus for an intro class, there seem to be two broad strategies one can follow.

First, one can do a broad but shallow survey of a lot of different topics in philosophy. As far as I can tell, this kind of approach seems like the dominant one that people use, at least where classes with titles like “Introduction to Philosophy” are taught.

Alternatively, one can pick a small number of topics, and focus on them in some depth, hoping that this illustrates what goes on in philosophy.

I’ve been drifting towards more of the alternative strategy, so next year my intro class will largely be on philosophy of religion and philosophy of mind. (Though we’re reading the Meditations for the mind section, so there will be some serious epistemology in there to.) So I’m interested in thinking about the pros and cons of each strategy.

The benefits of the survey approach seem to be:

# Students get an idea of the different kinds of subjects they can study in philosophy.
# Students don’t get bored if they don’t like a particular topic
# There is more chance to really focus on the best accessible philosophical work, you don’t have to try and work everything into a coherent package
# Relatedly, you get to at least tell them about many of the best and most interesting ideas of the last few hundred (or thousand) years
# The title isn’t misleading; if you want to do an intro philosophy of mind course, you should call it that, not ‘Introduction to Philosophy’.

The benefits of the alternative approach are:

# You get to work through things in greater detail
# Students might actually learn something about mind, or philosophy of religion, or whatever, rather than just learning that these topics exist
# It’s only when working through things in detail that the distinctively philosophical aspects to the methodology come through

Well, I’m sure there are more benefits than this, but those were the immediately apparent ones. What approaches do people here who teach big intro classes take to the subject? Should I be going back to the ‘broad but shallow’ approach that seems reasonably successful?