Teaching with Large Language Models in the History of Philosophy

A Recursive Approach

Abstract

This paper examines and catalogues my experiences assigning students to use large language models (LLMs) to engage with material from the history of philosophy.  Following suggestions to make recursive assignments from Julia Staffel, the LLM centered assignment asked students to elicit two responses from generative AI with the same prompt and then evaluate which response was superior.  Student performance on the assignments generally mirrored what they had done on traditional essay assignments in my classes, suggesting that the LLM assignment was appropriate for college level classes.