The Philosophy Club 26 Sep 201226 Sep 2012 There are an increasing number of initiatives to present philosophy and critical thinking to school students, and I am pleased to announce a new one in my home city of Melbourne: The Philosophy Club for ages 8 to 11. As I have argued in print, earlier conceptual acquisitions tend to greatly affect downstream beliefs, so teaching kids to question early will mean they are more inquisitive and less accepting of simple appeals to authority later, which means a critical populace. I therefore expect it to be legislated against shortly… Australian stuff Education Logic and philosophy Pop culture
Evolution Things Glenn Beck has never seen 24 Oct 2010 A DNA sequence Comparative anatomical diagrams Behavioural studies of apes and humans compared Psychological studies of apes and human children Fossils A science book His arse Read More
Biology Domains, disciplines and levels 10 Aug 201110 Aug 2011 I have to get this out of my head so I can go do some real work (like finding some real work). Next time someone wants me to do metaphysics, they better come armed with a cheque. So if, as I have argued, reduction is one-layered in ontological terms, however… Read More
Education Philosopher threatened with prison for copyright violations 5 Apr 2009 I’m very conflicted about this: An Argentinian professor who put Derrida’s works in translation online because the published works were out of print or too expensive (way more than the European editions) has been charged with criminal copyright infringement, according to this page. While I think that publishers, especially academic… Read More
Lots of things are subversive, but being judged ‘subversive’ may lend philosophy a certain cachet that makes it more attractive. On the other hand there are so many different philosophical schools of thought that you can envisage the subversive forces shattering into internal conflict…
… being judged ‘subversive’ … All good teaching is subversive, though perhaps not always in a way that the authorities find threatening.
I used to figure that studying mathematics and science should be as much as most students needed of philosophy but seeing the incredibly low level ability of even real scientists to deal with ideas outside of their specialty, not to mention the abysmal level of thought among the blog sci-rangers, The Philosophy Club is urgently needed. It’s unfortunate that they started calling natural philosophy “science”. It seems to have led a lot of people to not understand that science depends on logic and that it is inextricably embedded in the vicissitudes of humans and our minds confronting the same universe that philosophy deals with in a more encompassing way.
Let me give a plug for Q Is for Question, a book written and illustrated by a former student of mine. http://www.qisforquestion.com/Welcome.html