The first anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the beginning of conflict in Gaza left UK schools with a dilemma: how to mark the event. It has affected many around the world, including school children and their families in the UK. Earlier in 2024, government adviser on social cohesion, Sara Khan, suggested that schools were […] … learn more→

New scientific understanding and engineering techniques have always impressed and frightened. No doubt they will continue to. OpenAI recently announced that it anticipates “superintelligence” – AI surpassing human abilities – this decade. It is accordingly building a new team, and devoting 20% of its computing resources to ensuring that the behaviour of such AI systems will be aligned […] … learn more→

The practice of philosophy with children has been developing all over the world for more than 50 years. The stakes are multiple and go far beyond the need to democratize the teaching of philosophy upstream of the Terminale class. It is a question of developing critical thinking from an early age, of cultivating complex thinking and the […] … learn more→

Contrary to what the title of his book The Postmodern Explained to Children (1986) suggests , Jean ‑ François Lyotard’s thinking is not the most accessible, a fortiori for our dear blond heads. A philosopher commonly associated with the motley and questionable movement that is French theory , he seems to have been eclipsed within it by the thoughts of Foucault, Deleuze or Derrida, whose […] … learn more→

The life choices that had led me to be sitting in a booth underneath a banner that read “Ask a Philosopher” – at the entrance to the New York City subway at 57th and 8th – were perhaps random but inevitable. I’d been a “public philosopher” for 15 years, so I readily agreed to join my colleague Ian […] … learn more→

My title–at least the first part–comes from a Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway musical of the 1960s, now I suspect embarrassingly dated (although it’s been revived as recently as 2011), that I adored in high school.  But this post comes in response to an op-ed piece published two days ago in the Dallas Morning News by two University of Dallas philosophy professors.  Their essay […] … learn more→

During his unsuccessful campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Marco Rubio made the dubious (and grammatically unsound) assertion that “we need more welders and less philosophers.” Bill Miller clearly disagrees with the Florida senator. Miller, a prominent investor who spent three years studying philosophy at Johns Hopkins University as a graduate student, recently gave that school US$75 million to […] … learn more→

Philosophy has deep roots, with a clear historical evolution.  It is about knowledge, and the argument for why (and how) we exist in the first place. Western Philosophy is considered by many to be the foundation of philosophy in our modern times.  Early philosophers before Socrates focused hypotheses on metaphysics, or the Study of Existence […] … learn more→

Scientists now know that the universe contains at least two trillion galaxies. It’s a mind-scrunchingly big place, very different to the conception of the universe we had when the world’s major religions were founded. So do the astronomical discoveries of the last few centuries have implications for religion? Over the last few decades, a new way […] … learn more→

Young people today are constantly at risk of indoctrination – whether deliberate or inadvertent. This can be by advertisers, politicians, religious extremists or the media – and can make it hard for young people to get a handle on the world around them. But in this age of contradictory images and constant messages, I believe […] … learn more→