Thinking Beyond The Curriculum
Read More“there are many philosophical anti-realists who accept the non-existence or possible non-existence of widely believed concepts or experiences and yet advocate living as if they are real nevertheless, for a wide range of reasons.“
Read More“now it is three weeks since the day I got my positive COVID test, and I cautiously think I may have survived it, I have decided to look back at the experience to see what, if any, philosophical lessons it taught me.“
Read More“The pandemic has shown just how flimsy “the way things are” actually are. From basic norms of social interaction to entire economic systems, COVID-19 has unwittingly acted as the liberating hand breaking the chains of Plato’s epistemological prisoner and dragging them out of the cave and into the light…This isn’t, however, a post about the coronavirus…“
Read More“It has been a week of waiting.“
Read More“as I curl up with another scary story and find myself predictably sleepless later on, trembling at familiar creaks made new, and far more sinister, by the unsettling images now in my head, I wonder: with horror so real and ever-possible why do we indulge in the self-harm of scaring ourselves intentionally, at Halloween or any other time?“
Read More“The Trump virus found the ultimate weaknesses in organised human life: 1) we have such shaky foundations at the best of times for what constitutes as real “knowledge” that if you repeat an untruth enough times, from enough “sources”, it can seem just as “true” as any legitimate truth; and 2) that the notion of external authority on which our political systems are based is entirely illusory. As any criminal can tell you: that there are laws against doing certain things impose no actual limitation on doing that which is against the law. Criminals, by definition, break laws all the time. And the only differences between those who break laws who we call “criminals” and those who break laws that we don’t, are either that they have been caught or that we don’t really enforce the law.“
Read More“Inspired by listening to Olivia Coombes talking about the philosophy of time travel on a recent episode of The Panpsycast philosophy podcast, I was reminded, sadly, that I have already empirically proven the impossibility of time travel several times over in my career as a teacher. Or at least I have attempted to.”
Read More“When the stakes are this high (life and death) we need to be able to separate nostalgia and sentiment for what is sensible and what is necessary. “
Read More“the world has changed. And here are the questions arising to me as it does…”
Read More“When we are, and when we are not, conscious seems to be a fairly fundamental piece of self-knowledge every human being should have access to. The more I worry about my insomnia, however, the more I realise how little about our own unconsciousness we actually know.”
Read More“As an atheist I have not practiced religion for a few years, however, just because I went from belief in God to a dis-belief in God does not mean that all the religious beliefs I held are overruled straight away, or in a simplistic and straightforward manner. This fear of hell stays with you forever.“
Read More“There is a truth out there, beneath the soundbites and clickbait. There are actual facts about what our politicians have done and what they are planning to do and it is our duty as citizens, whoever we are voting for, to make sure our vote is as fully informed as is possible. A television debate will never give us that. They are nothing more than a PR stunt. Another stop on the campaign trail. A mechanism for repeating buzzwords and talking points. To treat them as anything more than that is to abdicate our democratic responsibilities and leave ourselves open for manipulation and propaganda.”
Read More“If we cannot change the past itself then why do we concern ourselves with the ‘what ifs’? Perhaps we may want to conceive that the grass would have been greener in the present if the past had been different...”
Read More“Philosophy has long had a tradition of asking questions about the difference of appearance versus reality and today I want to talk about how people appear to you compared to how they really may be inside.”
Read More“I think of the Chinese Room often as a teacher, especially around exam season, and wonder how much our obsession with testing has led to a Chinese Room approach to learning?”
Read More“although we did watch the same movie on the screen, in our heads, we perceived two very different things. The cause of these alternative experiences being the mental environment into which the sense-data was ultimately processed, our mental experiences of the movie being more than merely passive acceptance of the sights and sounds projected inside the cinema.”
Read More“If each of our experiences of the world are isolated within a personal island of subjective qualia, then no two people can know for sure whether they experience the world in the same way. What this means for identity politics, is that the underlying notion that Muslims can talk about Islamophobia, the LGBT community about homophobia, non-white ethnic groups about racism, and women about sexism (etc.) with an authority that is lacking from a “non-member” of each group falls apart. Every woman will experience living as a woman in a patriarchal world uniquely; every person who has been discriminated against because of their race, sexuality or religion has felt that hurt without peer.”
Read More“Data, in theory, means measurability, tracking and accountability, and therefore is favoured and celebrated by those in the business of measuring education, tracking education, and holding education accountable. Every year teachers across the country collect spreadsheet after spreadsheet of meaningless data on their pupils. They analyse that data and discuss it endlessly with managers and leaders and make decisions about future planning based on what the data says. But the data gathered is, invariably, pure garbage.”