If you have, DO let me know! Among the many books on philosophical themes published last year, Julian Baggini’s opus is an excellent study which is likely to prove a most useful complement to existing resources on the teaching of the Core theme. You may think ‘Oh no! Not another book on the problem of human identity’ except that The Ego Trick. What does it mean to be you?(Granta) combines the seriousness of a philosophical enquiry with the light accessible style associated with its author. Baggini relies on a range of fascinating accounts – as diverse as the views of a Tibetan lama and the full-time academic researcher, part-time hooker, Dr Magnanti – to explore the deepest sources of the self and lift the veil on its most unusual, not to say unconventional, aspects. Baggini is a regular contributor to The Guardian as well as the editor-in-chief of The Philosopher’s Magazine. His RSA talk gives a flavour of the ideas he develops in his most entertaining and stimulating Ego Trick: http://www.thersa.org/events/video/vision-videos/julian-baggini
Triple A Learning IB Blogs
Philosophy
Welcome to the Triple A Learning blog for DP Philosophy. The most recent blog posts are listed below and you can access the blog archive by following the appropriate link in the panel on the left.
February 1, 2012
January 17, 2012
Professional development with Triple A Learning’s cost-effective online workshops
There is still time to take advantage of Triple A Learning’s cost-effective online workshops. Over the last three years we have trained over 4000 IB teachers on our IB authorised workshops, at both category 1 and category 3.
Follow the links below to see the range on offer. Our next session begins on FEBRUARY 20th. Do not miss out on these…book now to update your professional training. Our interactive workshops and resources will help take your career to the next level and support your classroom practice. Our courses cover subject-specific and whole-school topics and make the in-service training budget go further.
December 11, 2011
On being ‘philosophical’
Philosophy is often associated with Big Questions such as ‘Why is there something instead of nothing?’ or ‘What is the purpose of life?’ Ancient philosophers were particularly interested in the ways philosophy could help us living better lives, that is, feeling better about ourselves. Thinkers like Epicurus and Seneca became models of a new kind of virtue no longer driven by public honours and reputation but by the demands of an ‘authentic’ life, reflecting the true nature of each individual. The theoretical purpose of philosophy is to instil in its practitioners an independent way of thinking founded on the use of critical reason and logic. But what about its more immediate practical applications? Philosophy can play a therapeutic role in our lives and help us achieve some degree of inner peace though the lessons learnt by past thinkers. Philosophers are often wrongly portrayed as ‘misery guts’ too happy to delve into our tragic human condition and the prospect of our inescapable personal extinction. After all, Jean-Paul Sartre had to deny the ludicrous accusation that existentialism was intent upon celebrating ‘the sordid and the base’ in humanity while ‘ignoring beauty and the brighter side of human nature.’
Being ‘philosophical’ necessarily implies a unique way of perceiving and judging the world around us without being fooled by its deceptive trappings. To become a Sartrean existentialist requires the same radical open-mindedness as Plato’s prospective philosopher leaving his cave of ignorance behind. The sceptic Epicurus remarked that the key to well-being lies in clearly understanding the distinction between desires that are natural and necessary and those which we may chase for most of our life only to find them hopelessly transient or simply unattainable. Philosophy tells us about accepting our own limitations and gradually becoming impervious to false hopes and empty temptations. The Renaissance man, Michel de Montaigne, had the walls of his library tower covered in words of wisdom from his favourite ancient philosophers. His main ambition was to understand himself better and come to terms with all the confusing aspects of his complex personality. Montaigne was not pursuing some eternal, absolute truth but his own personal truth. In this respect, he aimed to think and live ‘philosophically’ and fully accept his ‘true’ self, warts and all. At a time of religious wars and growing sophistication in the arts, Montaigne was not afraid to strip his ego on the page and invite his readers to share his most inner desires and fears. His famous saying that ‘to philosophize is to become accustomed to the idea of death’ is an echo of Epicurus’ comment that ‘death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.’ Like Montaigne, every true lover of philosophy eventually finds his own personal ‘therapist’ , the philosopher who shares his vision of existence and brings him comfort when he most needs it. For it is, indeed, in times of uncertainty and crisis that philosophy reveals itself as the cathartic antidote to a reality suddenly perceived as too oppressive to bear.
(See: Alain De Botton , Guide to Happiness. Montaigne on Self-Esteem)
On being ‘philosophical’
Philosophy is often associated with Big Questions such as ‘Why is there something instead of nothing?’ or ‘What is the purpose of life?’ Ancient philosophers were particularly interested in the ways philosophy could help us living better lives, that is, feeling better about ourselves. Thinkers like Epicurus and Seneca became models of a new kind of virtue no longer driven by public honours and reputation but by the demands of an ‘authentic’ life, reflecting the true nature of each individual. The theoretical purpose of philosophy is to instil in its practitioners an independent way of thinking founded on the use of critical reason and logic. But what about its more immediate practical applications? Philosophy can play a therapeutic role in our lives and help us achieve some degree of inner peace though the lessons learnt by past thinkers. Philosophers are often wrongly portrayed as ‘misery guts’ too happy to delve into our tragic human condition and the prospect of our inescapable personal extinction. After all, Jean-Paul Sartre had to deny the ludicrous accusation that existentialism was intent upon celebrating ‘the sordid and the base’ in humanity while ‘ignoring beauty and the brighter side of human nature.’
Being ‘philosophical’ necessarily implies a unique way of perceiving and judging the world around us without being fooled by its deceptive trappings. To become a Sartrean existentialist requires the same radical open-mindedness as Plato’s prospective philosopher leaving his cave of ignorance behind. The sceptic Epicurus remarked that the key to well-being lies in clearly understanding the distinction between desires that are natural and necessary and those which we may chase for most of our life only to find them hopelessly transient or simply unattainable. Philosophy tells us about accepting our own limitations and gradually becoming impervious to false hopes and empty temptations. The Renaissance man, Michel de Montaigne, had the walls of his library tower covered in words of wisdom from his favourite ancient philosophers. His main ambition was to understand himself better and come to terms with all the confusing aspects of his complex personality. Montaigne was not pursuing some eternal, absolute truth but his own personal truth. In this respect, he aimed to think and live ‘philosophically’ and fully accept his ‘true’ self, warts and all. At a time of religious wars and growing sophistication in the arts, Montaigne was not afraid to strip his ego on the page and invite his readers to share his most inner desires and fears. His famous saying that ‘to philosophize is to become accustomed to the idea of death’ is an echo of Epicurus’ comment that ‘death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.’ Like Montaigne, every true lover of philosophy eventually finds his own personal ‘therapist’ , the philosopher who shares his vision of existence and brings him comfort when he most needs it. For it is, indeed, in times of uncertainty and crisis that philosophy reveals itself as the cathartic antidote to a reality suddenly perceived as too oppressive to bear.
November 24, 2011
Triple A donates new computers to One Laptop Per Child cause
Here at Triple A Learning, we’ve always supported the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) cause. With a mission to “empower the world’s poorest children through education“, who could fail to be moved by its ideals.
What OLPC believes
On the virtues of peripatetic philosophy
Aristotle was the first philosopher to extol the virtues of peripatetic philosophy or the art of thinking while walking. In our computer-bound world, the very idea of going out for a meditative walk may appear bizarre. What’s wrong with interacting with the world from the safety of one’s home or office? Descartes would have embraced the IT revolution as one can just imagine him answering young Princess Elizabeth’s latest query through extended emails and texts. Yet, this is the way philosophical enquiry began and no doubt Plato himself invited his student Aristotle for contemplative strolls down to Piraeus harbour in the same way Socrates had conducted his dialogues with friends or strangers accosted in the middle of busy Athenian streets. The Socratic method demanded the immediate receptiveness of the participants to new ways of thinking as the master’s thought s were punctuated by the rhythm of his feet. The man who described himself as a ‘gadfly’ needed the open air to chase and trap new ideas. Just like the walker’s body is constantly subjected to new impressions and sensations, his mind is liberated from the confines of pure logical thinking as well as the temptation to reach for a book and lose his unique stream of consciousness.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau found in his solitary walks the inspiration for a new Romantic sensitivity, alien to his salons obsessed contemporaries. Rousseau rediscovered his true self through his direct contact with nature. Unlike Socrates for whom walking was a way of letting his mind wander and hit upon the right train of thought, Rousseau strove to lose his ‘civilised’ self and let his ‘natural’ side enjoy the basic sensations of being at one with his surroundings. Walking certainly has a soothing effect on the mind and illness-prone Nietzsche regarded his daily perambulations as an essential therapeutic as well as philosophical exercise. His most provocative thoughts were inspired by long, strenuous walks through the mountains and valleys of the German and Italian Alps: ‘A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.’ Both Rousseau and Nietzsche were individualists who chose to pursue their own truth off the beaten track. Posterity celebrates them for the originality of their thought and their idiosyncratic way of thinking. Maybe, we should follow their example and take our philosophy students out of the classroom and let our feet take us onto unexplored philosophical paths.
October 21, 2011
August 8, 2011
The case of the missing umbrella:
The most universal definition of knowledge is that the latter is ‘justified true belief’, meaning that whatever information we think we possess must be corroborated by sufficient evidence but also, and just as importantly, by an inner conviction that, what we know, is actually the case. In our conscious life, we may, indeed, be fully aware of our home address or the year of the battle of Hastings. We simply know that we know such facts. However, our ordinary life is full of potential lapses of memory and Sigmund Freud first attempted to shed some light on what he called ‘the psychic mechanism of forgetfulness’, in a short essay published in 1898. Freud was interested in the unconscious, unfulfilled desires hidden behind such temporary dysfunctions. However, we are more concerned, here, with the philosophical effects of our occasional lapses of knowledge in everyday situations.
Let’s take the example of a missing umbrella. The weather has not been so good for several days and, for some reason, unknown to you, you haven’t taken your usual precaution of taking an umbrella while leaving the house. After several days, it gradually dawns on you that the reason for not using the umbrella was because you somehow knew that it was actually nowhere to be found. It is as if your unconscious mind had been informing you, in a mysterious way, that there was no need to take an umbrella. We have all experienced such a situation which reveals some fundamental aspects of our knowledge of both ‘Being’ and ‘Non-Being’. In his famous 1945 essay on ‘Being and Nothingness’, Jean-Paul Sartre highlights a key principle of our understanding of Being, by warning his reader that ‘the permanent possibility of non-being, outside us and within, conditions our questions about being.’ But under which circumstances can we ever claim to be conscious, and therefore to have any form of knowledge of so-called ‘nothingness’?
Sartre provides a telling example of such an occurrence in the opening pages of his long essay: he has an appointment with Pierre in a café, at four o’clock and arrives a quarter of an hour late. He is surprised not to see Pierre as he is always punctual. Sartre comments: ‘Is there an intuition of Pierre’s absence, or does negation, indeed, enter in only with judgement?’ In other words, do I experience the absence of Pierre or do I arrive at the conclusion that if Pierre is nowhere to be seen, he must, indeed, NOT be in the café. In fact, Pierre’s absence is not an evanescent, elusive event. It is fully accessible to my knowledge since through the presence to my mind of his physical absence, Pierre makes me aware of his former existence. The same conclusion would equally apply to the missing umbrella, which, through its physical absence eventually reminds me of its former existence and usefulness to me. It is out of their similar ‘nothingness’ that both Pierre and the umbrella eventually re-establish their presence in our mind.
July 4, 2011
A.N Whitehead and Process Theology:
Who knows about Alfred North Whitehead, these days, when the academic world seems to have moved from the days of the truly Renaissance man to the more mundane recognition of the philosophical specialist? Yet, Whitehead deserves to be better known and, more importantly, better appreciated as he was not only Russell’s Mathematics tutor at Cambridge but collaborated with the latter on the extraordinarily ambitious Principia Mathematica, published in the early 1910’s. This work alone expanded the previous logical systems of Aristotle and Leibniz and paved the way to the logic developed by Alan Turing in his post-war computing machines. Whitehead had a distinguished career at both Cambridge and London Universities but his many interests, as an academic polymath, took him to the other side of the Atlantic as he was invited, aged 63, to teach Philosophy at Harvard University. Paradoxically, his philosophical legacy does not lie in the field of physics or mathematics (Russell, himself, suffered from a nervous breakdown when he realised the few unavoidable inconsistencies of the Principia logic) but in the realm of Theology. Greatly influenced by the revolution introduced by Einstein’s theory of relativity, Whitehead came to support an interpretation of physical reality based on the idea that ‘change is constant , whether we measure it by minute or by millennia; we ourselves are a part it; we have been brought into existence in a certain quarter of the universe in consequence of its processes, and there is no reason to suppose that other types of existence, unimaginable to us, have not been produced elsewhere in the universe.’
Applying his scientific belief to the realm of theology, Whitehead conceived an ever-changing and constantly evolving universe, created by a God who, himself, is in a constant process of self-transformation while sharing the joys and tragedies of his creatures. Such an unfinished Creation has been criticized for implying the fundamental limitations of an imperfect deity. However, Whitehead defended his theory by arguing that God and mankind may, one day, come together when man’s moral and intellectual qualities lead him to his ultimate apotheosis. For Whitehead, ‘God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. This creative process is everywhere … In so far as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality, reducing the question of whether his individuality survives death of the body to the estate of an irrelevancy. His true destiny as co-creator in the universe is his dignity and his grandeur.’
May 15, 2011
Ethics and Applied Ethics
The expression ‘applied ethics’ sounds like a contradiction in terms as if ethics consisted exclusively of the theoretical study or passive contemplation of pure ideas, such as patience or justice. Ethics means nothing if its principles are not directly and consistently “applied” to situations requiring a moral response informed by a familiarity with ethical judgements and a degree of personal experience. In this light, ethics is not so much about what we do but about the kind of moral agent we are (Virtue ethics), intend to be (Kantian ethics) or purport to be (Utilitarian ethics).
Applied ethics is the result of two combined historical factors, ultimately leading to a new conception and re-definition of what constitutes a practical moral code. The first historical factor is the slow decline of traditional moral values and gradual loss of faith, spreading across nineteenth-century Europe at a time when science is becoming the new religion of mankind. Darwin unwittingly unleashed a new scientific spirit, not only prepared to defy the last remnants of religious orthodoxy but to deny altogether the very foundations of Judeo-Christian morality. Ethics was suddenly faced with its own moral dilemma: what was the place or point of ethical principles in a world seemingly ruled by blind biological laws? If ethics was no longer to serve its original purpose as guide to ‘the good life’, perhaps its new role could be to act as a bulwark against the unstoppable progress of science and its meddling with the very ‘stuff’ of life, namely conception and death.
Today, science has invaded every aspect of human life and although it has not quite ‘killed’ God, it has certainly minimised his moral influence over individuals and seized its chance to shape the very future of the human species. Applied ethics might not be able nor willing to slow down medical nor technological progress but its mission and duty is to defend and protect the existence of inalienable principles of respect towards any form of life, be it human, animal or vegetable.
