Tapton Sixth Form

Dear all,

Tapton (S10 5RG, ten minutes walk from Broom Hill) would like to begin on December the 8th. That's Monday. They want to start a lunchtime philosophy club. Who's with me?!

The first session will be an introduction to philosophy - what it's for, why it's useful, what it actually is, etc. and then a relaxed question and answer thing.

I'm not sure of the details or how many people we'll need. I'll post as soon as I know.

If you want in, reply and let me know!

With love,
Graham

Social

what are your opinions on date and place?

Thursday, 4th dec, university arms (i think thursday might be quiz night)

Adding "Labels"

Dear All,
Please add labels to your posts after this. (I already have added them to all the current posts). This will help to have a better browsing option as in the left side bar.

Merci!

Lesson Plans - we should post as many as possible here as a reference

Examples of Some Possible Trolley Problems

Standard Trolley: Forked track, switch, 1 person v 5 people

Consequence Ignorance: Same. But [thinks that he has made the train kill the 5/was just messing around].

Footbridge: Straight track, [person/person strapped to a rock/yourself] v 5 People.

Means Ignorance: Press a button which you are told will stop the train by dropping a non-specified object. The object is a [man/rock].

Diversion: Switch diverts train on to alternative route temporarily. On the diversion there is a [rock/a man/a-rock-with-a-man] that would stop the train.

Looped Track: Diversion on to longer loop which gives time to free 5, kills 1.

Consequences, unbreakable rules, whether we can use people as a means, side-effects …brilliant! Keeping it fairly simple.

Kids will undoubtedly want to talk about “What if it was [Mum/Hitler”. This is okay and legitimate, but we shouldn’t let the whole conversation be around this.

Overall project is to get the kids to think about what factors in their reasoning about ethical issues, and perhaps most importantly we should get them to ask whether they SHOULD reason about trolley problems in any particular way.

Plan

We will introduce a few problems.
We will judge whether it is better to split the class or not.
We will use the interesting problems to move intuitions around a bit/get discussion going.
Little bit of a, “what you have been doing is philosophy,” schpeel.
Little bit of a, “would you like to do this a bit more,” interrogation.

Super!

school profile: LONGLEY PARK

Longley Park 6th Form College
Horninglow Road
Sheffield
S5 6SG

The class we are teaching in is Hayley Rennie's Philosophy A level class, in the AS level year. There are about 20 pupils in the class.

The subjects cover a wide range of philosophy, and the seminars we give this year will cover philosophy of religion, epistemology and reason and argument, with more topics to be discussed later.

The college philosophy page is here: http://www.longleypark.ac.uk/course_details.php?id=70

King Ted

Johnny arranged the following sessions but cannot go himself as he is away for reading week.
can anyone go?

Monday,10th November from 10:15hrs - 11:15hrs
Tuesday, 11th November from 14:40 - 15:40hrs

Topic is the discussion of God as a human construct.