Meet Your Instructor

Professor Normand Theriault

Instructor, Philosophy & Humanities

Welcome to Introduction to Philosophy. My name is Normand Theriault, and I’ll be your instructor for this course. I’ve been teaching philosophy at the college level for a number of years, and my enthusiasm for the subject hasn’t dimmed — if anything, it’s grown. I hope some of that comes through in the pages ahead.

Philosophy, as we’ll practice it in this course, isn’t about memorizing what famous thinkers believed. It’s about following arguments carefully, noticing when something doesn’t quite add up, and being willing to sit with a hard question long enough to actually think it through. That takes patience — but it’s also, I think, one of the more genuinely useful things a person can learn to do.

My own interests in philosophy began long before I started teaching it. Over the years I’ve found that the philosophers we’ll be reading — Socrates, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Sartre — keep repaying attention. They tend to ask questions we thought we’d already answered.