Out of the Stove-Heated Room and into the Agora: The Emergence of Collaborative Undergraduate Research in Philosophy

Collaborative undergraduate research has been shown to benefit both student participants and faculty mentors, but it is much more widely practiced in the natural sciences than in the humanities. We argue that one key reason why collaborative undergraduate research is seldom practiced in philosophy is because we philosophers have been trained to conceive of ourselves as doing research in the stove-heated room of Descartes rather than in the agora of Socrates. We discuss two types of collaborative undergraduate research projects that philosophers can conduct with students in the agora, namely, projects in traditional subdisciplines of philosophy and projects in the scholarship of teaching and learning in philosophy. We argue that some proj-ects of each type can benefit participating students and faculty mentors alike.