Thinking Beyond The Curriculum
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.“
Well, it’s been a hell of a year and it’s finally coming to an end! At the stroke of midnight January 1st 2021 there will be a magic cure to all the ills of 2020: COVID-19 will be no more, Trump will be resolved and Brexit will be easy. I joke, of course. The loosening of safety precautions for COVID around Christmas is going to be an unnecessary death sentence for many and we are in for a bleak winter ahead. But for now, take a rest and enjoy the two week break (or latest 14 days of self-isolation, depending on how your year has been!). We’ll be back with new posts again from Monday January 11th. See you then!
Read More“As a teacher of RE, and head of RE at my school, that we RE teachers are supposed to give oxygen to such ignorant and discriminatory views in our classrooms – and treat their prejudice and hurt as something that is to be respected – is something I find an outrage.“
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“And yet this post exists…”
Read More“The Grinch who steals Christmas this year isn’t COVID 19, it’s the mindset that is so rigid about what Christmas has to be it can’t conceive of doing things differently.“
Read More“As I tell my students, the absolute worst way to judge how good a philosopher you are would be to take away all of your books and resources, isolate you so you cannot speak to anybody else, and set you an arbitrary chunk of time in which to answer a really big question.“
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?“
As always, we’re on break during the school holiday. Take a look at our archives and if you want to write a post for us, click HERE
We’ll be back next Monday (NOV 2ND) with our latest post
Read More“Unfortunately there is a school of though around masks that equates personal liberty with the freedom not to wear one, regardless of the potential consequences. A selfish conception of what it means to be free that ignores our social connections with, and the needs of, others for personal desire and gain.”
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“unlike the politician, doomed to blind allegiance to whatever colour team they are playing for, on whatever side of the aisle, the philosopher has loyalty only to the truth. If you can show me my argument is wrong, I am not only willing to change my mind, logic dictates that I have to.”
Read More“Breonna deserves justice. She should not be dead right now and the police killed her. But if I advocate the imprisonment of the police that killed her I am not advocating justice. I am advocating more barbarism. I am advocating the continuation of the prison industrial complex. I am advocating justice only when it suits me and injustice where it doesn't.“
Read More“As a philosopher it’s hard to follow the logic around Covid policy because in many cases there simply isn’t any. There is only the illusion of logic. A symbolic nod to a vague sense of health and safety which doesn’t dare follow its own argument to a conclusion for fear of what that conclusion might say.“
Read More“Before the lockdown came, we had borrowed three books from the local library. As I started the car engine to drive to work on Tuesday morning, one of the three books still remains unopened.”
Read More“since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the US has gone from perceived leader of the free world and centre of cooperation to a nation which continues to pull out of global organisations which ensure global security, health and sustainability, hence damaging the capability of all nations to respond to aggressive nations, climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic“
We’re on holiday (staying safely at home - this pandemic is not over) until Monday September 7th when the new school year begins and we’ll be back to posting a new article every Monday at 6am during term time. In the meantime, we’re still open for submissions if you want to write for philosophy unleashed, so send us your ideas and have a great summer!
Read More“I hope after a year of Philosophy Unleashed existing people have figured out that these little quotes are NOT the full article and that they have to click the title to read the whole piece…”
Read More“It doesn’t take a logician to see the problems with the Department for Education’s plan for secondary schools this September, but it can help to crystallise the specific flaws by laying out the argument carefully.”