Teaching Philosophy, Misc

The prestige of an academic institution may be determined as a function of affiliations with other academic institutions. Using digital tools to data-scrape, data-mine, and perform network analysis on university websites, an approximation of numbers of academic affiliations may be measured. Especially observing the alma mater institutions of the faculty of employed institutions, these numbers show the relative employment of alumni and a proxy metric for the relative prestige of their degree-granting institutions. These affiliations can be charted and graphed to (...) determine the distributions of affiliations throughout an academic ecosystem from which we might draw conclusions about that system’s hierarchies and inequalities. Here we use anglophone PhD-granting philosophy departments as a case study for this methodology with tentative conclusions. (shrink)

In this essay, I am going to explain how my moral intuitions are engaged with my beloved fictions: The Lifecyle of software objects (Ted Chiang, 2010); Wild Wise Weird: The Kingfisher stories collection (Vuong, 2024), The three-body problem (Liu Cixin, 2014). Indeed, stories move us and deepen our understanding of what it means to be human, and great story-tellers achieve what even the greatest philosophers aspire to: making us reflect on our shared humanity.

This story reproduces “The Perfect Plan” in the fiction title Wild Wise Weird, written by Professor Quan-Hoang Vuong with his permission. Prof. Vuong ’s other nonfiction title is Meandering Sobriety.

Sometimes philosophers have been misunderstood. It could be because the philosopher's communication was vague. It could also be because the philosopher didn't use Ockham's razor and multiplied terms unnecessarily forcing reviewers to impose the razor, with the result that what needs to be cut is not cut and what was essential is taken out of the equation. This article cites two cases, one of the Indian thinker M.M. Thomas and other of Peter Van Inwagen, who claimed that their thoughts were (...) misrepresented by some other well known thinker. (shrink)

(This is for the Cambridge Handbook of Analytic Philosophy, edited by Marcus Rossberg) In this handbook entry, I survey the different ways in which formal mathematical methods have been applied to philosophical questions throughout the history of analytic philosophy. I consider: formalization in symbolic logic, with examples such as Aquinas’ third way and Anselm’s ontological argument; Bayesian confirmation theory, with examples such as the fine-tuning argument for God and the paradox of the ravens; foundations of mathematics, with examples such as (...) Hilbert’s programme and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems; social choice theory, with examples such as Condorcet’s paradox and Arrow’s theorem; ‘how possibly’ results, with examples such as Condorcet’s jury theorem and recent work on intersectionality theory; and the application of advanced mathematics in philosophy, with examples such as accuracy-first epistemology. (shrink)

This is a guide to writing philosophy papers aimed at introductory students prepared by the philosophy faculty at Rochester Community and Technical College. It includes sections on reading philosophy and writing philosophy, as well as an explanation of common grading criteria for essays in philosophy.

There are many commonalities between the framework of roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons and the way in which we design classes and assignments. The professor (the dungeon master) selects a number of readings with some end goal in mind (the campaign). Along the way the students are expected to be active participants (roleplay) and the professor designs progressively harder assignments (quests) in order to test the students’ abilities and to promote learning and growth (leveling up). This structural analogy (...) prompted me to investigate how such a framework could be implemented more explicitly in a class, and in this chapter I describe how I did so. (shrink)

Writing philosophy well is an essential skill in our discipline. Philosophical writing must aim for clarity, precision, and rigor, but in doing so, it can often wind up dry, long-winded and boring. It can take many drafts to produce a paper that is suitable for publication in a journal, and many aspiring (and accomplished!) academic philosophers find the process of writing arduous and frustrating. Still, some people make it look easy – if you’ve read anything by Alan Hájek, you’ve probably (...) noticed his breezy style that effortlessly communicates complex ideas in simple terms. His concise and witty prose makes even formal epistemology, a notoriously complicated, math-heavy subject, accessible and engaging to readers. However, while it might look effortless, Hájek’s spirited style is in fact born out of deep and thoughtful engagement with the craft of writing. His motto is: “Work hard for your readers, so that they don’t have to.” Hájek’s approach is decidedly anti-genius: he believes that having good ideas and communicating them well can be taught, and he has devoted considerable energy to helping his graduate students improve their writing. He has written multiple articles about philosophical creativity, as well as an unpublished lengthy manuscript on the mechanics of writing. I have benefited myself from his advice – at least I believe I have, readers may judge for themselves. My aim in this article is to share a few of his insights that I have found most helpful for myself and for my students. I won’t try to summarize all of Hájek’s advice, and I also don’t claim that all of this is totally new. Rather, I will offer a small collection of greatest hits. I will cover eight aspects of philosophical writing, and for each one, I will explain the basic idea, and then discuss some ways of implementing it for oneself and one’s students. (shrink)

Uno de los pilares del proyecto de Filosofía para Niños de Matthew Lipman lo constituye su concepción de ciudadanía democrática, en razón de que es la encargada de promover y preservar el establecimiento de una democracia de alta calidad, que representa mucho más que la mera idea de sistema de gobierno o de régimen político. En efecto, la ciudadanía democrática asume esta forma de organización de la sociedad como una manera de vivir, lo que debe traducirse en que las acciones (...) de las personas sean solidarias y transformadoras, algo que resultaría del despliegue de las habilidades superiores del pensamiento. Por tanto, no es gratuito que esta propuesta de educación filosófica para la infancia apunte a la formación de ciudadanos razonables, ya que una tarea así requiere de la propiciación de ciertas condiciones que favorezcan el desarrollo del pensamiento multidimensional en las aulas de clase; en este sentido, el arribo a una democracia plena y reconstructiva requiere de una preparación integral en las comunidades de investigación, de cara a un ejercicio efectivo de la ciudadanía democrática. De modo que el propósito de este artículo consiste en evidenciar el lugar privilegiado que ocupa dicha ciudadanía en el constructo del filósofo y pedagogo norteamericano. (shrink)

The diversion of forest land for development requires accurate tree enumeration to assess environmental impact. Traditional methods, like manual counting and sampling, are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to error. This project leverages high-resolution satellite and drone imagery, combined with advanced image processing and machine learning, to automate tree counting. Our system includes analytical tools, and provides authorities with historical environmental data (like rainfall, temperature, humidity) for informed decision-making. With a userfriendly interface and appealing data visualizations, it also integrates Google Maps (...) API for user-generated satellite imagery. This solution aims to enhance accuracy, efficiency, and scalability in tree enumeration, supporting sustainable forest management and regulatory compliance. (shrink)

Children from various countries have been acknowledged and studied for their ability to philosophize, while, unfortunately, Filipino children have not received similar recognition. In this paper, I make a rather unpopular claim that Filipino children can and already are doing philosophy in their efforts to make sense of their existential conditions. “Doing philosophy” here refers to the act of being perplexed by one's own or other people's experiences and making an effort to comprehend them. Filipino children, are a vast and (...) diverse group, coming from various backgrounds, speaking different or even multiple languages, and representing rich cultures and unique circumstances. This diversity adds richness to the wide array of experiences from which existential questions can emerge. However, to truly comprehend the philosophical thinking of Filipino children, they need opportunities and guidance to explore their existential questions and solutions, regardless of how tentative or rudimentary these may seem to adults. Without such opportunities, it remains unclear to what extent their thinking engages with philosophical themes and issues. This not only offers Filipino adults a view of children’s inner worlds but also brings fresh perspectives to commonly held assumptions. (shrink)

Teacher quality, its effect on students’ outcomes, and the association of these with economic growth, is the core of recent discussions in Latin America given the region’s weak results in international learning assessments. This paper investigates whether there is an effect of philosophy on the outcomes of critical reading for students in B.Ed. programs in Colombia. Relying on exact matching combined with propensity score matching with regression adjustment, we use national data from Colombia to show that students in B.Ed. in (...) philosophy outperformed students in other B.Ed. in critical reading test (0.401–0.124 SD), and, importantly, with higher effects observed for students with lower prior academic achievement (0.44 SD). This suggests that philosophy can help to narrow educational outcomes of students whose socioeconomic conditions are disadvantageous, contributing to social justice in education. (shrink)

Given the great significance of institutions in the journey towards sustainability, most of them lack the ability to measure and improve their ESG activities. Based on this argument, this work presents the development of a web-based application called ESGConnect, intended to assist institutions in the evaluation process pertaining to their sustainability practices through an interactive structured submission and feedback mechanism. In ESGConnect, institutions provide ESG-related documents, which administrators verify and score with recommendations on how to enhance the documents based on (...) the Environmental, Social, and Governance criteria. User-specific dashboards are present on the tool: administrators monitor submissions, whereas users see scores and comments associated with the submissions. In addition to these items, ESGConnect also supports collaboration because students and various stakeholders are allowed to have a dedicated online community for discussion and sharing information on sustainability practices. The architecture of the platform relies on Java Servlets, JSP, and database integration for easy handling of user management and data. Preliminary testing does indeed suggest that ESGConnect might be able to facilitate better communications and actionable insights for institutions interested in improving their sustainability efforts. Expansion of the platform features and improvement in scalability to service a much larger number of educational institutions are part of the future work. (shrink)

How do we prepare engineering students to make ethical and responsible decisions in their professional work? This paper presents an approach that enhances engineering students’ engagement with ethical reasoning by simulating decision-making in a complex scenario. The approach has two principal inspirations. The first is Anthony Weston’s scenario-based teaching. Weston’s concept of a scenario is a situation that changes in response to choices made by participants, according to an inner logic. Scenarios can dynamically explore open-ended complex problems without imposing predetermined (...) results, allowing students to apply their ethical reasoning in a more realistic fashion. The second inspiration is Thi Nguyen’s theory of games. According to Nguyen, games are the “art of agency,” meaning that they provide a structure under which some result is agreed to be valuable, along with prescribed ways of achieving that result, in a relatively low-stakes and temporary social arrangement. By playing many games, Nguyen argues, we can develop a “library of agency,” that is to say, a set of values and means to achieving them that can inform how we make high-stakes decisions in real life. Engaging with carefully designed game scenarios, then, can enable students to practice making ethical decisions within a structured framework, which unfolds in response to their choices, while their decisions are driven by some defined goal. This roleplaying game–based approach thus allows students to build their own ethical libraries of agency, in preparation for professional decision-making. The approach is illustrated using a specific example recently deployed in a seminar on engineered living materials (building materials that incorporate living tissues). The scenario uses techniques from tabletop roleplaying games (e.g. Dungeons & Dragons) for outcome resolution, adventure design, and character creation. Through the game, students practice making difficult decisions in a humanitarian context. (shrink)

Hume describes skeptical philosophy as having a variety of desirable effects. It can counteract dogmatism, produce just reasoning, and promote social cohesion. When discussing how skepticism may achieve these effects, Hume typically appeals to its effects on pride. I explain how, for Hume, skeptical philosophy acts on pride and how acting on pride produces the desirable effects. Understanding these mechanisms, I argue, sheds light on how, why, when, and for whom skeptical philosophy can be useful. It also illuminates the value (...) of skeptical philosophy for a humanistic education, giving us a reason to include Hume in curricula. (shrink)

Many philosophers have argued that large language models (LLMs) subvert the traditional undergraduate philosophy paper. For the enthusiastic, LLMs merely subvert the traditional idea that students ought to write philosophy papers “entirely on their own.” For the more pessimistic, LLMs merely facilitate plagiarism. We believe that these controversies neglect a more basic crisis. We argue that, because one can, with minimal philosophical effort, use LLMs to produce outputs that at least “look like” good papers, many students will complete paper assignments (...) in a way that fails to develop their philosophical abilities. We argue that this problem exists even if students can produce better papers with AI and even if instructors can detect AI-generated content with decent reliability. But LLMs also create a pedagogical opportunity. We propose that instructors shift the emphasis of their assignments from philosophy papers to “LLM dialogues”: philosophical conversations between the student and an LLM. We describe our experience with using these types of assignments over the past several semesters. We argue that, far from undermining quality philosophical instruction, LLMs allow us to teach philosophy more effectively than was possible before. (shrink)

This paper offers a reconstruction of the interpretations of Descartes's ideas of place and motion by Dutch Cartesians (Henricus Regius, Johannes de Raey, Johannes Clauberg, and Christoph Wittich). It does so by focusing on the reading of Descartes's Principia philosophiae (1644) offered, in particular, by the dictated commentaries on it. It is shown how such commentaries bring to the light new potential Aristotelian-Scholastic sources of Descartes, and the different ways Dutch Cartesians brought to the fore, also with the help of (...) such sources, the rationale of the Cartesian text: in doing so, they constituted a philosophical school. (shrink)

The meaning of academy given in Athens in antiquity is connected with the aim of the journal Theology and Philosophy of Education. This text explains the journal's conceptual roots with methodological distinctions. Both the role of the phenomenological approach and key persons are mentioned.

Este artigo explora o uso de metodologias lúdicas, como gamificação e narrativas, para tornar o ensino de Lógica mais dinâmico e acessível no Ensino Médio. Através de enigmas como os do tipo Cavaleiros e Patifes, abordam-se tanto a lógica proposicional clássica quanto as não-clássicas (notadamente, as lógicas paraconsistentes e modal),proporcionando um aprendizado ativo e colaborativo. O artigo oferece ferramentas práticas para educadores, com ênfase no desenvolvimento de competências críticas e na criação de um ambiente inclusivo, acessível a todos os alunos.

تعالج هذه الورقة البحثية مدى مساهمة تدريس القيم المجالية في مادة الجغرافيا بالسلك الثانوي التأهيلي في تنمية التربية المجالية لدى المتعلمين بالسنة الأولى باكالوريا آداب وعلوم إنسانية، حيث يتميز البرنامج الدراسي المقرر لهذا المستوى بحضور مؤشرات عن التربية المجالية، وأجرأته عبر مضمون الوحدات الدراسية نموذج درس "الموارد الطبيعية: التشخيص وأساليب التدبير"، بهدف تكوين مواطن مسؤول عن سلوكه تجاه المجال، وقادر على تحمل مسؤولية حمايته والحفاظ على مختلف موارده, من خلال حسن تدبير وترشيد استغلال هذه الموارد بهدف تحقيق التنمية المستدامة. ........ (...) This research paper discusses the contribution of teaching spatial values in geography in secondary schools to instill spatial learning among arts and humanities learners in the first year baccalaureate .Indicators on spatial learning and its implementation are represented through the study units’ content, “Natural Resources: Diagnosis and Management Techniques”, as an example. This is to create a citizen responsible for his behavior towards his living environment, capable of shouldering responsibility for self-protection and for preserving his various resources, and aware of good governance to manage and rationalize the exploitation of these resources, as sustainable development states. (shrink)

Truth is a key notion in Ockham’s philosophical reductionist program, a notion that has been the object of contrasting interpretations in scholarship. My interpretation is that, for Ockham, ‘being true’ expresses an epistemological relation, namely the one through which our mind reflects on a proposition of language, compares it with an extra-mental state of affairs, and thus ascertains their correspondence. Placing truth at a point of intersection of language with mind and reality, Ockham’s interpretation of Aristotle’s characterization of philosophy as (...) the science of truth comes to be innovative. For Ockham, philosophy is a meticulous training of interpretation of language in order to account correctly for the truth-value of propositions. (shrink)

Current approaches used in educational research and practice to evaluate the quality of written arguments often rely on structural analysis. In such assessments, credit is awarded for the presence of structural elements of an argument, such as claims, evidence, and rebuttals. In this article, we discuss limitations of such approaches, including the absence of criteria for evaluating the quality of the argument elements. We then present an alternative framework, based on the Rational Force Model (RFM), which originated from the work (...) of a Nordic philosopher Næss. Using an example of an argumentative essay, we demonstrate the potential of the RFM to improve argument analysis by focusing on the acceptability and relevance of argument elements, two criteria widely considered to be fundamental markers of argument strength. We outline possibilities and challenges with using the RFM in educational contexts and conclude by proposing directions for future research. (shrink)

This is an accessible summary - online, The Well - 1st September 2023 - of concerns raised in my book 'The Myths We Live By' and my latest, 'How To Think Like a Philosopher: Scholars, Dreamers and Sages Who Can Teach Us How to Live'. -/- Herewith as PDF.

While calls to integrate ethics into computer science education go back decades, recent high-profile ethical failures related to computing technology by large technology companies, governments, and academic institutions have accelerated the adoption of computer ethics education at all levels of instruction. Discussions of how to integrate ethics into existing computer science programmes often focus on the structure of the intervention—embedded modules or dedicated courses, humanists or computer scientists as ethics instructors—or on the specific content to be included—lists of case studies (...) and essential topics to cover. While proponents of computer ethics education often emphasize the importance of closely connecting ethical and technical content in these initiatives, most do not reflect in depth on the variety of ways in which the disciplines can be combined. In this paper, I deploy a framework from cross- disciplinary studies that categorizes academic projects that work across disciplines as multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, or transdisciplinary, depending on the degree of integration. When applied to computer ethics education, this framework is orthogonal to the structure and content of the initiative, as I illustrate using examples of dedicated ethics courses and embedded modules. It therefore highlights additional features of cross-disciplinary teaching that need to be considered when planning a computer ethics programme. I argue that computer ethics education should aim to be at least interdisciplinary—multidisciplinary initiatives are less aligned with the pedagogical aims of computer ethics—and that computer ethics educators should experiment with fully transdisciplinary education that could transform computer science as a whole for the better. (shrink)

This study developed and validated E-learning Self-directed Interactive Modules (E-SelfIMo) for Earth Science. The study employed Research and Development method, using the Borg and Gall development procedure, in creating eight e-modules using Kotobee software, evaluating them by experts and students, and determining their effectiveness in terms of students' conceptual understanding. Experts agreed that E-SelfIMo met the DepEd standards for non-printed learning materials, and students attested to their high validity in content, format, and usefulness. Pretest and posttest results for the effectiveness (...) of E-SelfIMo revealed that students exposed to the E-SelfIMo have progressed from “Near Mastery” to “Near Full Mastery” in the chosen Earth Science topics, showing more significant improvement in their conceptual understanding than the control group. This study concludes that E-SelfIMo supports interactive, active, and self-directed learning thereby, improving students’ motivation, engagement, interest, and performance. The E-SelfIMo could be used with technology integration as a teaching and learning tool. -/- . (shrink)

Understanding academic gender gaps is difficult because gender-imbalanced fields differ across many features, limiting researchers’ ability to systematically study candidate causes. In the present preregistered research, we isolate two potential explanations—brilliance beliefs and fixed versus growth intelligence mindsets—by comparing two fields that have inverse gender gaps and historic and topical overlap: philosophy and psychology. Many more men than women study philosophy and vice versa in psychology, with disparities emerging during undergraduate studies. No prior work has examined the contributions of both (...) self-perceptions of brilliance and fixed versus growth mindsets on choice of major among undergraduate students. We assessed field-specific brilliance beliefs, brilliance beliefs about self, and mindsets, cross-sectionally in 467 undergraduates enrolled in philosophy and psychology classes at universities in the United States and Canada via both in-person and online questionnaires. We found support for the brilliance beliefs about the self, but not mindset, explanation. Brilliance beliefs about oneself predicted women’s but not men’s choice of major. Women who believed they were less brilliant were more likely to study psychology (perceived to require low brilliance) over philosophy (perceived to require high brilliance). Findings further indicated that fixed versus growth mindsets did not differ by gender and were not associated with major. Together, these results suggest that internalized essentialist beliefs about the gendered nature of brilliance are uniquely important to understanding why men and women pursue training in different academic fields. (shrink)

What makes a good leader? This paper takes Socrates in Plato’s early dialogues as the starting point for developing three leadership skills that are still relevant today: being on a mission, thinking in questions, and thinking like a beginner. I arrive at these Socratic leadership skills through an interdisciplinary approach to Plato’s early dialogues that puts Socrates in conversation with a diversity of thinkers: modern-day business leaders and leadership coaches, educators, Zen Buddhists, and art historians. I show that Socratic leadership (...) skills are valued in today’s business world, and I propose concrete exercises that can help anyone acquire these skills. In contrast to Platonic leadership—the leadership skills of the philosopher king—Socratic leadership skills have not been the focus of much investigation. This paper aims to advance a scholarly conversation about Socrates as a leadership model. (shrink)

What are we going to do about ChatGPT? Some philosophical reflections and arguments in general opposition to students using ChatGPT.

Student evaluations of teaching (SETs) have been used, researched, and debated for many decades. It is a common practice in higher education institutions, with the supposed purpose of improving course quality and effectiveness, but with unintended consequences of encouraging and motivating poor teaching and causing grade inflation. There is strong evidence that SET “effectiveness” does not measure teaching effectiveness. This paper reviews empirical research examining common concerns about the usefulness (positive and negative) and accuracy of SETs. The findings reveal that (...) student satisfaction relates to their anticipated/expected grades in their courses; hence, they want to get good grades and their instructors want to get a good rating of SET, and this results in grade inflation. The key points are that SETs (1) allow students to speak their “mind”, (2) have no compelling correlation between quality of teaching and learning effectiveness, (3) reward easy, less demanding, and lazy teachers with a positive rating, (4) are biased against gender, attractiveness, ethnicity, race, etc., (5) are weaponized against “some” faculty members, and (6) are like asking convicts awaiting sentencing to evaluate the judge or jurors who convicted them. (shrink)

This paper reflects on the role of philosophy in the school environment, paying special attention to the promise of intergenerational dialogue carried forward by philosophy programmes associated with Lipman’s Philosophy for Children (P4C) curriculum and its current transformation into Philosophy with Children (PwC). There are two basic ideas that constitute the guiding thread of my reflections. Firstly, that philosophical interventions of that kind challenge adult-centric views of education and philosophy. Secondly, that such initiatives carry with them the promise of acknowledging (...) children as equal participants in the process of philosophical questioning and meaning creation. In the first part of the paper, I argue for the importance of understanding the act of philosophizing with children as a disruption of adult-centrism. First, I reflect on a narrow future-directedness that seems to characterize the temporality of school. I suggest that P4wC interventions interrupt such a future-directedness inviting the students to immerse themselves into a dilated ‘now’ of multiple possibilities. Then, I reflect on the ways in which P4wC interventions challenge the assumption that philosophy is an adult preoccupation. Special attention is paid to the work of scholars who challenge our restrictive assumptions about what qualifies as philosophical thinking. In the second part of my paper, I turn to the work of Merleau-Ponty with the aim of sketching out some requirements for the possibility of a dialogue between childhood and adulthood. I suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on childhood and expressive speech are invaluable in the context of P4wC because they invite us 1) to appreciate the alterity of children without reducing them to inferior ‘others’ and 2) to remain alert to the expressivity of children’s speech. (shrink)

Despite the emphasis on dialogue and argumentation in educational settings, still not much is known about how best we can support learners in their interthinking, reasoning, and metadialogic understanding. The goal of this classroom intervention study is to explore the degree of students’ dialogicity and its possible increase during a learning programme implementing dialogic and argument-based teaching goals and principles. In particular, we focus on how students from 5 to 15 years old engage with each other's ideas, and whether/how this (...) engagement is influenced by lesson and classroom setting factors. The participants were 4208 students distributed in preprimary, primary, and secondary classrooms of five countries (UK, Portugal, Germany, Spain, and Cyprus). Findings suggest that there is a consistent increase with age for some high-dialogicity moves, and students behave more dialogically in whole-class discussions rather than small-group activities. (shrink)

How should we conceive of policymakers for the purposes of political analysis? In particular, if we wish to explain and predict political decisions and their consequences, if we wish to ensure that political action is as effective as it can be, how should we think of policymakers? Should we think of them as they are commonly conceived in traditional political analysis, i.e., as uniquely knowledgeable and as either altruistic (i.e., as motivated to realize goals associated with their constituents’ interests) or (...) knavish (i.e., as motivated to realize goals associated with their own personal interests), or should we treat them as possibly ignorant with respect to their political tasks? -/- It is always an open question whether policymakers possess the knowledge required to realize some policy objective. It should never be assumed a priori that policymaker knowledge is adequate to the policy tasks with which policymakers are charged. Politicians need knowledge concerning the causes of social phenomena adequate to control events sufficiently well to ensure the success of their policies. No argument has ever been offered for the standard, if only implicit, assumption that policymakers, somehow automatically, possess this knowledge. In many contexts, there is no reason to believe that policymakers possess or can acquire this knowledge. Indeed, a bit of reflection reveals how unlikely it is that and how rare the circumstances must be in which policymakers meet this condition, which political philosophers, theorists, economists, and other political thinkers have traditionally assumed as a matter of course. -/- The main purpose of the book is to encourage a conversation among scholars and students of political inquiry (in philosophy and political theory, political science, economics and political economy) concerning the best way to conceive of policymakers for the purposes of such inquiry. -/- The book defends an alternative, more realistic, method of political analysis. The book argues against the false assumption that policymakers are epistemically privileged. The book presents and defends the alternative assumption that, with respect to the knowledge required to discharge their political tasks effectively, policymakers are at least as ignorant as constituents. -/- The book further argues that whether policymakers are altruistic or knavish is, in the first instance, a function of the nature and extent of their ignorance with regard to constituent-minded policy goals. Policymakers who possess the knowledge required to be effectively altruistic are more likely to be altruistic, other things the same, than policymakers who are ignorant of the knowledge that successful altruism requires. -/- This being said, my goal is more to leave readers thinking about and inclined to debate these profound issues than to prescribe a particular methodological conclusion (even less to advocate a particular political conclusion). The book is a heuristic for spurring further conversation. It makes of readers fellow interlocutors partnered with the characters (and the author!) of the dialogue. -/- The vehicle for this analysis is a conversation between four friends, philosophy graduate students, with different interests, different levels and kinds of experience, and different political preferences. The four friends consider how politicians should be conceived for the purposes of analyzing political decision-making and its consequences. -/- In his famous Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, David Hume concluded that the assumption of an all-knowing and all-powerful God was neither necessary nor sufficient to explain natural phenomena. Dialogues concerning Natural Politics does for social science what Hume did for natural science. Both books undermine the assumption that some epistemically privileged being – God in the case of natural phenomena and God-like politicians in the case of social phenomena – must be invoked to explain relevant phenomena. (shrink)

An article about the place philosophy has in our lives. Lectured on youtube.

This essay fills in some historical, conceptual, and pedagogical gaps that appear in the most visible and recent professional efforts to “revive” Philosophy as a Way of Life (PWOL). I present “American Philosophy and Self-Culture” as an advanced undergraduate seminar that broadens who counts in and what counts as philosophy by immersing us in the lives, writings, and practices of seven representative U.S.-American philosophers of self-culture, community-building, and world-changing: Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), Henry David (...) Thoreau (1817–1862), Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), Henry Bugbee (1915–1999), and Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004). Students enter the class with preconceptions about who philosophers are, what they do, how they write, and the languages in which they write. Students walk out with new senses of self, place, and language that emerge through new ways of seeing, doing, and writing philosophy. (shrink)

This text, titled The Responsibility of Educators, is the editorial of the second issue of the second volume of the journal Theology and Philosophy of Education.

Embodied self-reflection goes beyond strictly rational thinking – we are thinking beings after all, for it includes our tacit concrete knowledge, as Michael Polanyi and David Bohm would describe the thinking that is implicit in our abilities to know how to do things such as knowing how to ride a bicycle. Polanyi describes this knowledge as: “[knowing] more than we can tell.” To become aware of the thinking below the surface of rational thinking is very challenging. Yet that is exactly (...) what is required for any kind of self-awareness and self-transformation to take place. To become aware of our own thinking essentially means becoming aware of oneself as a witness to our own thinking in the process of thinking. Bohm understands thinking as a movement and similarly to becoming aware of our physical movements through proprioception, so too can we become aware of our thinking as a movement. Proprioception of thinking implies proprioception of embodied thinking. -/- (Self-)reflection is (self-)examination or (self-)scrutiny is a process that requires the courage to question one’s self and with it the touchstones underlying our identity. This process is a form of parrhesia, for parrhesia is essentially also a form of infinite questioning, and which can also be applied to questioning the self. (shrink)

It is crucial for engineers to anticipate the socio-ethical impacts of emerging technologies. Such acts of anticipation are thoroughly normative and should be cultivated in engineering ethics education. In this paper we ask: ‘ how do we anticipate the socio-ethical implications of emerging technologies responsibly? ’ And ‘ how can such responsible anticipation be taught? ’ We o ff er a conceptual answer, building upon the framework of Responsible Innovation and its four core practices: anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion, and responsiveness. We (...) forge a more explicit link between the practices of anticipation, reflexivity, and inclusion, while also enriching them with insights from disability studies, STS, design theory, and philosophy. On this basis we present responsible anticipation as an activity of reflective problem framing grounded in epistemic humility. Via the RI-practice of responsiveness we present responsible anticipation as a creative approach to engineering ethics, offering engineering students a critical yet productive perspective on how ethics may inform innovation. (shrink)

This paper discusses the rationale for, and efforts to quantify the success of, philosophy outreach efforts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a focus on the National High School Ethics Bowl (NHSEB). We explore the program's democratic foundations and its potential to promote civic and intellectual virtues. After describing pioneering efforts to empirically access the impact of NHSEB, we offer recommendations to empower publicly and empirically-engaged philosophers to conduct further studies in the future.

The narrative’s conception came from a real-world story intended for Meandering Sobriety. Then, it was rewritten in Vietnamese in mid-September 2023, with its original title being “Love’s Dream of Kingfisher and the Joy of Awakening”. This English version will be included in the next edition (3th) of The Kingfisher Story Collection.

The aim of this paper is to clarify under what conditions a philosophical problem arises. I will describe two ways in which we might perceive a question as a problem. First, when we fnd ourselves inclined to believe in propositions that appear incompatible with each other. Second, when we fnd ourselves inclined to believe in propositions that seem incompatible with our desires. I will discuss both of these cases and articulate a didactic strategy – the Clash Strategy – which can (...) be used in order to plan and facilitate dialogic inquiry in the classroom. This strategy suggests introducing stimuli that will help students appreciate the clash that drives the philosophical question to be explored during the dialogue. In summary, this paper aims to ofer insights to all teachers interested in promoting dialogic inquiry, whether philosophical or otherwise, in education. (shrink)