Reason & Persuasion Book Site

Plato's Euthyphro: Practice Questions

I've been promising to feed this blog with something more substantive for a while now. I've finally got something: a 42 page PDF - all nicely done up with bookmarks and a handy-dandy linked key - containing 65 passage-based MCQ questions about Plato's Euthyphro. They are reading comprehension/informal reasoning-type questions. I've written them over the years for exam purposes, but I also use them for teaching purposes. And students are encouraged to use them to self-diagnose their reading difficulties, and to give them some idea what they are supposed to be reading for.

I have similar sets for Meno and Republic - almost 200 questions in all. I'm going to format those other sets likewise over the next few weeks. I think the lot of them could be very useful for instructors (like me) who are obliged to make exams for very large classes. With a question bank of 200 questions, it's possible to whip up an exam pretty quick. Such questions are obviously not very philosophically exalted (although I flatter myself that a few have a certain conceptual sparkle, or at least a brute brain-tickle.) But they are time-consuming to produce, so I am happy for others to take advantage of my efforts.

Plato's Euthyphro Practice Questions (PDF). Go ahead and download the set.

Shocking Bad Form, Not Updating The Blog And All

I have some things in the works for this blog which aren't quite ready: teaching resources, specifically. These batches of very handy test questions I have up my sleeve. I promise to have those up by the end of the week. (There. Now I'm committed.) In the meantime, I have done something else. I uploaded pretty much all the illustrations in the book to a Flickr set. The illustrations began life as visual aids for my PPT slides for my large intro class, and I figure if anyone else wants to use them for that - well, go ahead. (I may be the only person in the world who can truly say that I learned to draw so I could use PPT.) Most of them aren't particularly pedagogically amenable - unless you were to adopt my book for classroom use, I suppose (hint! hint!) But others might be more generically useful to the Plato or philosophy instructor looking for clip art that isn't the usual wretched stuff.

I hereby resolve to be more useful to this blog. As Plato says, books are very helpless things, always crying on their authors for assistance when anyone asks a question. And this goes double for blogs, which aren't even written yet. Except for the relatively few, pitiful bits of them that have been written already.