Thinking Beyond The Curriculum
Read More"Trump is undoubtedly a monster. Trump is a massive threat to the kind of democracy that all Americans should hold dear. But he is using the playbook of professional wrestling to win the White House once again and is therefore a monster we are responsible for keeping alive so long as we continue to not take the influence of professional wrestling on politics seriously."
Read More“As a self-identified punk since my teenage years, I am very used to feeling shame about watching the Eurovision Song Contest each year, and even hiding the fact from people who know me…“
Read More“This is not just Hollywood stuff. This is not just the entertainment business. This is all work under capitalism.“
Read More“is Madonna’s late start really “unconscionable, unfair, and/or deceptive”? In philosophical terms: are such late start times, different from those advertised, genuinely immoral?“
Read More“It is epistemically wild to watch how fellow human beings construct seemingly viable theories of knowledge out of the flimsiest of observations and inferences.“
Read More“When you speak to a classroom of teenagers about the possibility that playing violent video games might make them violent, you can immediately see the smirks and ready yourself for their knee-jerk defensiveness. After all, they are the smirks and defensiveness you, yourself, have given in response to the same suggestion your whole life…“
Read More“When things are so awful everywhere all the time, they lose their impact as being awful. Exploiting children to bring us cheap consumer goods is no longer an outrage, it’s just good business. Taking a home away from someone is just what happens. Another bomb is dropped on Gaza, we hit another year in the Russian invasion of Ukraine - this is just life for those people. We glaze over. We don’t think too much about it. We share some more funny memes and watch videos of people injuring themselves online.“
Read More“in a world where there is a very real epistemological threat coming from falling down online rabbit-holes into algorithm-guided conspiracies, we teachers are spending a lot of our own free-time guided by those very same dangerous algorithms as we hunt and click for hours looking for the perfect clips for our students. We then normalise this behaviour to our students“
Read More“Like garbage washing up on the shore of a polluted sea, the Philosophy classroom is often where a lot of these deepities come to rest as students, impressed by their apparent wisdom, share them with the one person they think will be equally impressed: their Philosophy teacher. Often those students are soon disappointed, even angry, when that teacher is not impressed at all and, instead, pops the bubble of the illusion and exposes its emptiness.“
Read More“To not comment on the state of the world today is never to be impartial. It is to implicitly state a preference - a partiality - for maintaining things exactly as they are, inflammatory immigration policies and all.“
Read More“Instead of asking what we are reading on World Book Day, we ought to raise the level of questioning: what are we reading and how is it changing us? What is it making us think? What questions are the book raising? Even if the answer is, to all these questions, not a lot (I am unchanged, not thinking about anything, and asking no questions), to ask them makes us perhaps realise that some books are like junk food while others are more nutritious.“
Read More“Don’t let the illusion of sole authorship fool you. Published writing has always been edited by many and influenced by audiences. If you want to read the unblemished, pure and unfiltered draft straight from the author’s mind and onto the page, read something self-published (like this blog…although I do tend to do a few drafts). Anything else you read, assume there have been drafts, edits, alterations, corrections, and the input of many. The author, often, is a group of authors. Dahl is no different.“
Read More“Why complain about this in a philosophy blog? Because a perpetual area of philosophical inquiry concerns perception versus reality, and sometimes this coming apart of perception from reality (or reality from perception) often leads to questions in ethics too. I believe this problem - of the women’s teams of football clubs not sharing the same home ground as their male counterparts - touches on both.“
Read More“Last week it seemed clear to me that the England men’s football team showed a deficiency when it came to courage, and failed to act with virtue when told by Fifa not to wear their OneLove armbands in Qatar.“
Read More“I love the Netflix series Stranger Things. I’m supposed to. It is literally targeted directly to me: a weirdo child of the 80s…“
Read More“sometimes living together means compromise and not doing exactly what you want.“
Read More“Fletcher was certainly sexist. But his sexism extends to the logic of his argument too. It’s easy to show how…“
Read More“We have been primed to be ready for war. We have been conditioned to expect it imminently. We have been told that a time will come when we have to pick a side and that we may not even be able to trust our closest friends. We have been fed the ideological norms of conflict escalation and had massacre and genocide normalised. All in the name of entertainment. To assume such repeated and sustained messaging will have no impact is to ignore the evidence of all other successful marketing strategies.“
Read More“punk’s rebellious spirit - punk’s philosophy - is one of questioning norms and facilitating creative expression of new modes of thought and alternative ways of living. Which brings me to my concern - punk, or at least punks of my generation or older, seem to have gotten stuck on a knee-jerk fetishisation of physical music which is blinding them to some of the merits of modern technology and digital expression.“
Read More“In the days since, many have criticised the broadcasters for continuing to show traumatic footage. The collapsed player, the crying teammates, the shocked fans, the devastated wife, even the philosophical pundits shaken by what they had seen. Couldn't, in fact shouldn't, the stream have been cut and the tragedy kept as far out of the public eye as it could be?“