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
Logic and philosophy New resource for philosophy of mind and cognition 25 Oct 2007 David Chalmers and David Bourget of the Australian National University have a great new resource up of online papers on mind: Read More
Censorship A chilling effect 24 Apr 2010 In the judgment in favour of Simon Singh against the British Chiropractic Association’s bogus defamation action, the judge noted that the use of defamation law on scientific discussions had a “chilling effect“, and a movement has resulted to reform libel law, to which all three major parties seem to be… Read More
Epistemology On innovation 11 Aug 201226 Aug 2012 [I’ll continue the congenital beliefs series soon. Also chocolatarianist political theory] [Late note: Stefano Ghirlanda has pointed me at two papers he has coauthored on just this topic. In one, published in PNAS, he and his colleagues investigate a model of cultural innovation. In another, as yet unpublished, they argue that “creativity… Read More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