Acknowledgements

There are a number of individuals and institutions who have helped make this course.

Much of the momentum building up to this course came from events over the preceding years: an NEH Summer Institute held at Wesleyan University in 2018, and the founding of a Philosophy as a Way of Life Consortium by the University of Notre Dame with funding from the Mellon Foundation, which is hosting annual summer conferences.

We’d like to thank the people at Notre Dame and the Mellon Foundation for two subgrants, one to experiment with the use of Peer Dialogue Facilitators, the other to collaborate over the summer of 2020 to put together a large online/hybrid course and develop this website. Special thanks to Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko, who visited in February of 2020 to give an introduction to the Peer Dialogue Program, and to Wes Siscoe and Sam Kennedy who led an online “boot camp” for our Peer Dialogue Facilitators. We are particularly grateful to Paul Blaschko for consulting in course and website design throughout the summer of 2020, and to a team of student workers who helped assemble content and images: Jessica Beeg, Julia French, Ross Jensen,  Sam Kennedy, Katherine Machado, and Chase Miller.

Thanks, also, to people at Wesleyan’s ITS and Center for Pedagogical Development — Alyssa Beaulieu, Rachel Schnepper, Jennifer Rose, Amy Grillo, Sarah Ryan, and Jeffrey Goetz — and to Brianna Mebane, our student web design consultant in the summer of 2020.

And finally, thanks to our teams of student Dialogue Facilitators at Wesleyan over the years who have helped bring this course to life:

Abbi Abraham, Ben Anderson, Caitlin Sergi, Calvin Mustokoff, Ethan Park, Go Ishida, Jasmyne Le, Jaymin Choi, Jimmy McShane, Jordan Frederick, Julian DeMann, Katie Estep, Maddy Barket, Madie Notes, Margery Fang, Merik Schaefer, Michael Carpenter, Natalie Horberg, Orlando Osgood, Robbie Clemens, Rosie Hassel, Sabrina Seltzer, Sage Saling, Sebastian Evans, Serena Rumpler, Shuang He, Sofia Leautaud, Sophia Sinins, Swu Wu, Tamar Cox-Rubien, Tereza Pesmazoglou, Tessa Ury, Tomás Perez, Zack Thong

Their thoughtful preparation and genuine engagement with the material have created a space where students can meaningfully connect with one another and with the philosophical ideas at the heart of this course. The success of the Peer Dialogue program owes much to their dedication, creativity, and commitment to making philosophy a shared, lived practice.