THE PHILOSOPHY UNLEASHED ORIGIN STORY…

This is what I wrote in 2019 when starting this blog as a personal project:

As a teacher of philosophy in a British secondary school I live a life simultaneously filled with wonder that so much room for philosophy has been made within the UK education system, and deeply frustrated by how limited in scope that philosophy tends to be. 

Either smuggled into Religious Studies GCSE and A-level specifications and therefore restricted only to areas of theology, or bound by the institutional needs of exam boards specialising in philosophy-proper (such as AQA or the IB), where the need for rigour and dependability in marking often leads to an impoverished form of philosophy-by-numbers (an arbitrary selection of ancient arguments and objections presented like puzzle-pieces for students to organise and regurgitate on demand with very little independent thought); philosophy is on the curriculum in many places, but it is there to be learnt about rather than actually do.  

This is why, every term, whenever the opportunity presents itself, I offer my students the chance to have what my own A-level philosophy teacher used to call a “kick around” and what I now call “Philosophy Unleashed”, a lesson-long meandering discussion using the tools and techniques of philosophical enquiry to dissect and analyse any issue or issues of interest to the class that meet a single, important, criteria: it must not be covered by the exam specification we are studying.    

That is not to say the discussion cannot link to the course material eventually.  Often many links are found.  Nor is it to say that applying existing work of philosophers to the problems we discuss is frowned upon, or that we cannot cover areas long argued about.  Many times students or myself show how what we are discussing is analogous to, or part of, some great wider philosophical problem or well-known philosophical work.  The difference, however, is that unlike an exam question seeking tangible evidence of subject knowledge from a specific and assessable domain, citing the “greats” of philosophy is not the point here.  Our aim is merely to enjoy the act of actually doing some philosophy, free from the constraints of the exam board and its demands.  Philosophy unleashed, the way it was meant to be, back before academic expectations formalised and professionalised it.  

The idea for turning this sporadic academic treat into a regular blog came to me one evening as I was washing some dishes.  I was listening to a podcast interview with Rebecca Goldstein and hearing her passion for going beyond what her university professors and strictly religious parents wanted her to read as both a philosopher and a physicist I lamented to myself how rare such “unleashed” sessions were in my classroom due to the many demands of modern teaching and assessment.  In the last year we had covered the ethics of personal pronouns and the viability of anarchism but hadn’t had time for much else.  It struck me that rather than wait weeks and months for the next fleeting opportunity to go philosophically off piste, it might make for an interesting writing exercise to pick a different topic each week and see what I could write about.  Not only would this model the sort of thing I’m talking about, and demonstrate how relevant philosophy remains to so many areas of contemporary life, but it could also become a place for students and other A-level teachers to contribute their own “unleashed” pieces and apply philosophical tools to the unusual without waiting for my permission to do so in the classroom.

To that end I set myself a challenge of writing one post a week for the last eleven weeks of the 2018/19 academic year, with the plan being that if I was successful, and produced eleven philosophy unleashed blogs by the end of term, I would open the blog for public consumption - and submissions - in September.

I did - and so here is the blog. Enjoy! And get involved…