Sasser, Sondra

Western Philosophy for a New Generation

Faculty Mentor: Dennis Packard, Philosophy Department

As planned, Dr. Packard and I finished researching and writing our textbook, Western
Philosophy for a New Generation. We are still editing some things and getting advice from
other academics, but we deem the book to be a great success, and so do the classes who have
used it for two semesters at BYU. Students who were initially uninterested in philosophy made
comments like, “I finally understand what before was totally unintelligible,” and “Now I see how
it could be valuable for me.”

The publisher who initially showed interest in the book subsequently turned down the
manuscript, but a few other publishers have expressed interest as well, and we are still
determined to get the textbook to a larger market than BYU. We believe it is of utmost
importance for a general audience to understand the philosophies that saturate their life and
culture, many of which are harmful, and it is of the utmost importance for an LDS audience to
recognize that many of the philosophies they hold unsuspectingly are actually not in line with the
gospel and may even present difficulties to their testimony.

Because the textbook is written in an engaging, humorous, and narrative style, it has
appealed to a much wider audience than philosophy textbooks in the past, which tend to run
painfully dry. We added more links to make it electronically rich, more images, and made more
direct connections of the ideas to daily situations that readers may encounter. Students reported
much higher retention of the ideas and much more enjoyment from the reading, and came to
class more prepared than semesters in the past. We also researched more, based on
interpretations by experts on specific philosophers, in order to revise inaccuracies and deepen
explanations where they were not treated with enough nuance. Our goal was to improve the
voice of the text as well as its accuracy, and I believe we succeeded on both those fronts.