 Hello there everyone. I'm Nathan Wildman, assistant professor based in the philosophy department here at Tilburg. In this little video I'd like to just tell you a little bit about myself, tell you a little bit about my teaching motivations or my teaching philosophy. And then maybe just a few things about what I think I'm good at as a teacher, so you can get a feel for what I'm like. That's basically it, so let's go ahead and get started. So as I said, I'm an assistant professor here in the philosophy department. Research-wise I do a number of different things. The two big areas that I focus on are the kind of overlap between logic and metaphysics. In particular, I'm really interested in the notions of necessity and possibility. That is how things have to be or how they could be. And the other big area I work in is aesthetics. In particular, the aesthetics of things like video games and VR. A great thing to do some research on because I can sit around play FIFA all day and that counts as research. But of course this is really meant to be focusing on teaching. So what sort of teaching do I do? Well in the philosophy department we're pretty lucky. Because of the way Tilburg is designed, we actually get to teach people in all sorts of different courses. So I've taught some economics students before. In particular right now I'm doing quite a bit of teaching for the CSAI program as well as a communications department and some teaching for our own philosophers. So topic-wise I really do three things. The biggest one by far is I teach formal logic. So formal logic is wonderful. It's very cool. It's basically trying to give a mechanical or a very refined way to understand arguments. One of my favorite examples of formal logic. This little proof here. This is from Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica. I think it's about 170 pages in. This is them using their logical system to prove that 1 plus 1 is 2. But as well as formal logic I also teach digital aesthetics in the philosophy department and philosophy of technology. In particular focusing on philosophy of design. My later comments are going to mostly concern logic because that's kind of really what I do most of my teaching in. So that's sort of what I do. Why do I do it? Well I think obviously a key part of being a teacher is to help students grasp or understand various notions, concepts, tools, etc. But I actually think the most important thing being a teacher is to be there when things go wrong. So in particular what I mean by this is thinking especially here about teaching logic. I'm really concerned with trying to help students when they're say you know doing a national deduction proof and it goes wrong. It doesn't it doesn't work. Maybe a rule gets misused or can't figure out how to close it. To be there and to help the student identify or understand what went wrong. What's the pitfall and how to avoid it. But more importantly and this is going to sound a little cheesy but I think it's true. It's always to try and show or inculcate that failing is only bad if you refuse to learn from it. Get up, dust yourself off, try it again. Proof didn't work this way. Cool. Let's try it a different way. Just keep banging away at it. Just keep getting better. I think that's probably the most important lesson I can kind of get across. It's something I still try and work with on with regards to myself. It's something that I really hope I can get across to my students when I teach. In that sense, I'm very lucky because of the courses I get to do really help me to kind of get this across. But I think it's the most important thing I really do. Of course, how do I do it or maybe better? What is it I think that I do well when I teach? I think probably my best quality as a teacher is my passion, my enthusiasm. Teaching is fun. Teaching philosophy is super fun. Teaching formal logic is actually even better. I love it. I really enjoy getting to be there when students have a kind of Eureka moment and everything clicks. I love doing this stuff. As well as being passionate and enthusiastic, I also think that I am pretty good at using what I like to think of as strategic levity. So logic is hard, but it doesn't have to be so destroying to learn it. So we can use humor as an effective tool to kind of draw people in. Related to this, I think that I'm a compassionate and understanding teacher. I come at this with the idea that, look, we're all in this together. We're all going to try and figure it out together. Of course, the big ace of my sleeve is that I have an absolutely adorable dog, Yabka, and I use her all the time, for example, things like this. So these are really important things. But of course, we might wonder, cool, how do you teach during the corona crisis? One of the practicalities. Well, here what I really tried to focus on was not trying to recreate the physical classroom using digital tools, because I think that's just a mistake. I think it's better to try and come up with something that's distinctly digital that works just as well, if not better in certain ways. So really what I tried to do was minimize accessibility issues. I do pre-recorded lectures. We'd have live Q&A via Zoom. We'd make sure that there was forums for everyone to post on easy email access. The key, though, really would have highly interactive tutorials. So for logic in particular, what we do, I'd have a beautiful phone here and a phone holder. Use it as a document camera. Use that as a whiteboard that we could then work through our problem sets with. We would also be able to use things like private messaging. So students had questions, but they felt embarrassed, not able to just voice them in the group chat or put them in the chat. They could send me a private message and then I would basically be able to work through, like, what they want to know into the general discussion. So in some ways, I think actually teaching with corona was, well, obviously it was very difficult, but it also worked really well. I mean, one great thing is that I managed to do almost all my teaching where my flip-flops, so that was great. And, you know, sleep it in the couch with Yalbka. But I do think that teaching in the corona times offered particularly difficult challenges, but I think we got through it. I think it went pretty well in certain ways, or certainly as well as it could have done. So that's me. Yeah, thank you again for nominating me for this award. It is wonderful to be able to do this for a living. I think it's amazing. I'm just, I'm happy to be here, honestly. So yeah, thank you guys. Take care. And yeah, hopefully we'll see you around campus at some point soon.