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Philosophy in the Classroom
On the occasion of #PhiloFortnight2025, a period of two weeks in the UK dedicated to promoting philosophy, a webinar took place to demostrate some methods and resources that can be used to bring philosophical reflection and discussion in the classroom.
Poster of the webinar
The three panelists are all philosophers from the University of Birmingham and presented methods that they researched and practised and materials they designed:
Henry Taylor(Department of Philosophy) works at the interface of philosophy and STEM subject, with a special interest in consciousness, perception, and attention. Some of his recent research is on cultural robotics (e.g., see "A culture of their own").
The webinar was chaired by Kathleen Murphy-Hollies.
Laura D'Olimpio kicked off the webinar talking about the community of inquiry as an effective method to promote good philosophical discussion among people, including primary school children. The idea is that in education we want young people to be both capable to exercise critical thinking and compassionate, treating others with respect.
The community of inquiry can achieve this: based on the Socratic dialogue, it promotes a way of thinking that is critical, caring, collaborative, and creative, where members share their views and are encouraged to explore ideas, and even change their minds. Participants seat in an inward-facing circle and the facilitator is part of the circle, also a member of the community. It is important that the facilitator is well trained in the community of inquiry and can help steer the conversation in helpful directions, but is not an adjudicator who has all the answers.
Screenshot of the webinar, with Laura discussing the community of philosophical inquiry
Lisa Bortolotti presented her work designing resources for The Philosophy Garden and promoting their use in schools and cultural venues. What is distinctive about the resources is that they address timely issues that matter to everybody and they are designed by experts (philosophers who research the relevant areas and publish articles and books on the topic). This is important, because the resources offer an up-to-date and passionate take on the issues.
Lisa describes the video resources available at The Philosophy Garden
The Philosophy Garden features 11 animated videos that are very short and remind us of the classic Aesop fables: they have limited character and plot development, and the characters are talking animals facing a problem. They are easy to understand and offer the opportunity to appreciate different perspectives on the problem. They are a prompt, a stimulus for philosophical reflection and discussion. The idea is that young people think about the issues, identify aspects of their lives or situations where they have encountered those issues before, and offer their own creative solutions to how the issues can be addressed.
The Personal Identity game, adapted from a resource created for the Philosophy Museum in Milan
Henry Taylor described his brand new project, called Philosophy Smash with Henry. The project consists in Henry interviewing experts (professional philosophers) on fun, interesting philosophical problems, where the short interviews (6-10 mins) are accompanied by classroom activities that are inspired by the conversation (typically, games, debates, etc.). The videos are mostly aimed at KS2-3 but can be adapted for, and enjoyed by, more advanced students.
Henry talks about the experts he interviews for the Philosophy Smash series.
Henry explained that the chosen topics are already present in the curriculum (e.g., in religious education and in science) and so the videos can support teachers addressing those topics with their students, and he showed that the interviews can be broken up to help students with short attention spans to follow the whole discussion, and in the breaks class activities can take place. The tasks are engaging and stimulate creativity.
Topics to be addressed in the interviews for Philosophy Smash with Henry
If you want to learn more about the methods and resources talked about by Laura, Lisa, and Henry, and see how they answered questions from the audience, you can watch the whole webinar on YouTube!
This post is by Lisa Bortolotti. How has the definition of delusions changed in the DSM 5? Here are some first impressions. In the DSM-IV (Glossary) delusions were defined as follows: Delusion. A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility.
Today's post is by Karen Yan (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) on her recent paper (co-authored with Chuan-Ya Liao), " A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind " ( Synthese 2023). Karen Yan What drives us to write this paper is our curiosity about what it means when philosophers of mind claim their works are informed by empirical evidence and how to assess this quality of empirically-informedness. Building on Knobe’s (2015) quantitative metaphilosophical analyses of empirically-informed philosophy of mind (EIPM), we investigated further how empirically-informed philosophers rely on empirical research and what metaphilosophical lessons to draw from our empirical results. We utilize scientometric tools and categorization analysis to provide an empirically reliable description of EIPM. Our methodological novelty lies in integrating the co-citation analysis tool with the conceptual resources from the philosoph...
