Abstract

Students often enter a philosophy class believing that philosophy is the practice of logical one-upmanship. Defusing the in-class strategies that endorse this view is pedagogically challenging, but the theoretical tradition of immanent critique offers an opportunity to mobilize students’ thirst for honest philosophical debate in order to achieve a deeper understanding of the role of critique in philosophical discourse. In these reflections, I argue that what I will call the “gotcha” critique, often employed by students to fend off a more serious encounter with ideas, in fact provides an opening for the insights of immanent critique to convert the glib aims of the “gotcha” toward more critical approach to philosophical reflection.