Teaching

From my Examen Philosophicum class at NMBU

Teaching history

I have taught philosophy since 1996, when I was studying logic as an undergraduate at the University of Bergen. After this I taught philosophy of logic and language at the University of Tromsø for a few years, during my Masters and PhD. In recent years I have mainly taught philosophy to non-philosophers at bachelor, master and PhD-level.

Causation in Science, NMBU 2013-2019

I developed this course as part of the Causation in Science project, to engage students at NMBU in philosophical discussions about causation and the foundations of scientific methods. Stephen Mumford and I also used the course to plan and write two books: Causation – A Very Short Introduction and Causation in Science and the Methods of Scientific Discovery. In later years, I introduced risk assessment methodology to the course, taught by Elena Rocca.

Examen Philosophicum, NMBU 2015-

Teaching in the time of lockdown was a challenge, and all my students are stuck in front of the screen all day. To give them a break, I swapped the reading with podcast episodes. Students could still choose readings, but I wanted to cover everything in open access philosophy podcast episodes. I wrote about why podcasts make excellent syllabi. Here are my lecture handouts for this class.

Interdisciplinarity and Expert Disagreement on Sustainability, NMBU 2020-

Elena Rocca and I developed this course in 2020 as a pilot to teach students about the non-empirical foundations of science, what we call ‘philosophical biases’. Many scientific controversies about sustainability can be traced back to different philosophical commitments that are tacitly accepted in scientific frameworks and methods. A digital conference was part of the course and the talks are available here. The student feedback was positive, and they wrote an open letter to the university management: A call for promoting critical thinking for interdisciplinarity…

From 2022, this course is offered by the Faculty of Environmental Sciences and Resource Management as mandatory for all their Master students (Norwegian plus English version): MINA320 and MINA321. We also wrote a textbook from and for the course, including further readings, repetition questions and other resources. This means that anyone can teach the same course, based on the book (Part II and III).

Research Education Across Disciplines, NMBU 2022-

I designed a new version of the mandatory PhD-level course in Philosophy of Science and Research Ethics, MINA400. Normally, these courses are taught as intensive modules, e.g. over 2 weeks. In this version, meetings are arranged once a month, as 2 hours sessions, with a given topic to be introduced and discussed. Students choose which meetings to attend, depending on which topics are relevant for them, until they have been to 10 meetings. This way, one gets time to reflect upon the themes, and students are also encouraged to propose themes that they want to learn more about. I wrote about this course in Norwegian, for the Research Ethics Magazine. Today we have 120 PhDs signed up for the course, and 75 have already completed the course.

Teaching handouts

When I teach, I use the Mumford Method handout. For each lecture, the students get a handout containing my lecture notes. It includes a brief overview of the structure, contents and arguments of the lecture, with discussion questions on the back that we use in group work and for exam preparation. Here are my handouts from Examen Philosophicum, an introduction to philosophy class.