Welcome to the next edition of the Liberal Art Department’s Professor Profile Series. This edition is unique as we wanted to highlight an Honors Course Professor. Meet Professor Bryan Register, Professor of Philosophy.
Welcome to our series, Professor! We are interested in hearing about your course.
I’ve taught Philosophy of Sex and Love twice and will be doing it a third time this fall. I opened up thinking that the course should be very different from a regular ethics course, and that was a mistake — it should more closely resemble a regular class than I’d thought. The draw is just that the subject of sex and love is intrinsically interesting. My own sex life began with a loving commitment to lifelong monogamy that produced a daughter and ended in divorce. What are sex and love? Even when you narrow ‘love’ down to ‘sexual love’, then we have to ask what is sex, a question that turns out to be puzzling and might actually be an effort to solve an imaginary problem — that is, it could turn out that the concept of sex isn’t the concept of anything at all — that all of the things that we call ‘sex’ are too diverse for us to generalize over them. And then you have to ask how sex could “express” or “mean” love, or anything else. Why do we do sex and avoid it? What do we get out of it, and what can we lose through it?
What advice would you give your students to guarantee their success in your class?
Students will succeed in my class if they are ready to have some prejudices, not so much about sex and love, but about reasoning and logic, overturned, and if they’re willing to engage an often hilarious subject in a way that respects all of the roles that it plays in our lives while remaining light of heart. …and of course if they do the reading, seriously think about it, participate in class, turn in assignments on time that are clearly-written, and so forth.
How does teaching an Honors course drive your passion for education?
I would have to say that the class doesn’t drive my passion for teaching; that gets it the other way ’round. Teaching the same material semester-in, semester-out can sap one’s enthusiasm; if the honors class goes well, it lets me engage different material in modestly different ways — out of the rut, a bit. In the long run, I’d like to teach a diversity of special topics classes, honors or otherwise.
Stayed tuned for the next edition in our series, coming soon!