Thinking With the Past: A Whiteheadian Pedagogy

Teaching the history of philosophy should train us to think with the past rather than merely about it. In our talk, Daniel Bella and I will sketch that Whitehead is not just committed to this approach in his published writings, but that he also practiced it in the classroom and instructed his students to do so too. We reconstruct what Whitehead actually does with the history of philosophy and, from there, draw out its present pedagogical relevance. The key outcome is not consensus but a widening generality that interrupts our provincial habits and equips us for intellectually generous forms of inquiry.