 Hello folks, how are you doing? This session is going to provide a brief overview of a new textbook out from OpenStax College called Introduction to Philosophy. My name is Nathan Smith and I am the Senior Contributing Author on the textbook. The textbook is designed to be a general overview of Intro to Philosophy. It's supposed to meet the basic requirements for a general Intro to Philosophy class and it's designed like most OER to be used either as a supplement, as a main text or to have selections taken and built on. I'll just introduce you to the folks who wrote the book. That's me there. I was joined by several contributing authors on most of the chapters and then a host of reviewers and also people who provided instructor resources, test banks, PowerPoint slides, a comprehensive manual. There's a ton of great stuff here with the textbook like with most of OpenStax textbooks. The thing I want to focus on today is kind of what I think is the unique feature of this Intro to Philosophy textbook. We set out with the goal of creating a textbook that was genuinely multicultural and global in its approach. I think we achieved that. One of the challenges with Philosophy as a discipline is that it has historically not just by default or by omission left out groups of people, but it has actively and through internal justifications of philosophical authors excluded the perspectives of women of non-European cultures. Despite the fact that there are vast histories and very rich traditions of philosophy in certainly the Islamic world as well as India, China, and then even in many indigenous cultures. So what we tried to do with this book was to highlight that, try to bring some of that out. I'll show you a bit of that. In addition we tried to make the book genuinely practical, and I'll show you some of the features that highlight that do that. Some of the things we do in the book are pieces like Think Like a Philosopher, Write Like a Philosopher, Read Like a Philosopher. These are inserts where students can engage in active participation doing philosophy. So they provide like a guide for instructors to kind of give students an overview, or give them a sense of what it is like to do, to do philosophy. Table of Contents, and what you'll see is a fairly typical layout of a table of contents. Introduction, some critical thinking, history of philosophy, and then we touch on the major thematic areas of an intro to philosophy class, logic, metaphysics, epistemology. One thing of note is that we spend a fair bit of time on value theory, normative ethics, applied ethics, political philosophy. That area is the fastest growing area of professional philosophy. So I think it's valuable to spend a fair bit of time on those topics. They also have a pretty practical and interest for students. I want to highlight a few things in this Table of Contents that may be unique. So first when we do the critical thinking, research, and reading and writing chapter this chapter is really focused on the mechanics of thinking. The psychology of thought, cognitive biases as a barrier to good critical thinking. Talk about how to develop good habits of mind. Then we spend a bit of time on research methods and reading and writing philosophy papers. Really practical stuff, like how to find sources on the internet, how to evaluate and fact check those sources when you're searching for things. When we look at the reading philosophy, again some very practical sort of techniques for being a better reader of philosophy. And the same thing when we get to the writing of philosophy. Spend some time with some exercises on how to write a better philosophy paper. Next when we do the history of philosophy you'll see that we spend a fair bit of time on the early history of philosophy which doesn't even get to the Greeks. So we spend time with the indigenous philosophers around the world and looking at African world, North America Aztecs, the Mayans as well as others. We then spend a fair bit of time on the classical Indian tradition and the Chinese tradition. The second history chapter is the one that goes more towards the traditional sort of history of philosophy. We of course start in Egypt but then quickly jump to the Greeks and Romans and then we work our way up through the classical age looking at a variety of influences on scholastic philosophy in Europe. We end with another sort of historical approach. This looks specifically at 20th century historical schools of thought that maybe somewhat less dominant than the Anglo-American analytic tradition that really guides most of the books. So the last thing that I wanted to show you in this book is when we set out to create a book that was more multicultural and inclusive than a traditional philosophy textbook, one of the things we didn't want to do is simply have a section devoted to a particular non-western philosophy. We wanted that view of philosophy to be incorporated throughout the book. So one of the principles we used when introducing concepts is that if a concept could be introduced using a non-western, non-male perspective, then we should use that perspective to introduce the concept. For instance, in epistemology there's a classic problem in the problem of knowledge known as the Gettier problem where a person meets the criteria for knowledge. They have justified true belief, but they don't have what we would normally call knowledge. Interestingly another Indian philosopher, a Buddhist philosopher Dharmakirti, has an example that's very similar to Gettier-type examples, so we include that there. Likewise when discussing Descartes' dream argument, for instance, we introduced the dream argument using the Chinese Taoist philosopher Zhang Xiu, who has a sort of a similar, I mean it's a different story, but kind of introduces the concept that we need to get across to students. So the idea here is that we can use excellent examples to illustrate concepts for students that are drawn from a variety of sources and that way we integrate the philosophy of different regions right into the textbook.