Thinking Beyond The Curriculum
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“conspiracy thinking - the initial pathway that leads to conspiracy answers - trades on many of the motivating assumptions of philosophy as an activity: a desire to get to some underlying hidden truth beyond the superficial understanding of everyday life.“
Read More“This week I’m doing something a little different on Philosophy Unleashed and releasing a lecture I gave last week to Year 12 students at a Sixth Form interdisciplinary conference on the theme of inequality…“
Read More“Deciding not to bore the student with Donald Rumsfeld’s treatise on known knowns and known unknowns, I instead decided to offer guidance from the existentialists. That is to say: no real guidance at all. What my student was facing, I suggested, was a living example of the sort of anxiety and despair existentialist philosophers suggested comes from our absolute freedom.“
Read More“The more depressed you are the more accurately you see the world.“
It's a Christmas Carol one year later, and Ebeneezer Scrooge is doing a bit of philosophy which might undo his transformation…
Read MoreRead More“we need to first address with students core concepts like structural racism, white supremacy and white supremacist thinking, historical constructivism, critical race theory, colonialism, ideology, education policy and curriculum design. Without that, it will be very hard for the students we teach to place any of what they learn during Black History Month into a meaningful, long-term schema of knowledge.“
Read More“Consider: it cannot both be true that advertising has no influence on our thinking and that people spend over £23bn a year on advertising. At worst, people are spending their twenty three billion pounds to influence us in a range of ways we are barely aware of. At best, the only advertising that has ever worked is the advertising for advertising itself which has convinced so many people to spend billions on a product which is utterly useless. Which means advertising does still work.“
Read More“Miranda Fricker wrote of what she called “epistemic injustice” - “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower”. She identified two forms of such injustice: “testimonial injustice”, the injustice of denying credibility to someone’s word, and “hermeneutical injustice”, the injustice of disadvantaging someone in their access to interpretive resources and forming an obstacle to their capacity to know. This week a member of Sage, the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, urged the UK to expand its official list of Covid symptoms so that UK citizens could better identify if they have the virus. In this article I intend to show that by ignoring this advice, and keeping the official list of symptoms restricted to a high fever, a new continuous cough, or a loss of sense of smell or taste, the UK government is permitting a continuing epistemic injustice to occur which is causing unnecessary and highly preventable suffering.“
Read More“If the relationship of knower to supposed transferee is asymmetrical and hierarchical, abuses can happen.“
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“And yet this post exists…”
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“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“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.”