When successful, students use what they learned in this exercise to begin developing a sense of what they think would be a fair way of distributing resources and to critique the political and social institutions under which they live.

This bit of imaginative fiction is used by Plato, not merely to analyse our concepts of knowledge, virtue, and justice as many contemporary philosophers would have it, but to discover what we are required to do in order to be virtuous and just citizens

We fail if all we teach students is to be critical. We need to enable our students to conceive of a different and better way for things to be.

The way injustice often undermines our agency is by shrinking the horizons of what we think is possible. We simply accept that things cannot be any other way than they are. The kind of critical thinking central to philosophical education allows us to question how things are and, often, to realize that how things are is not how they have or ought to be.

Her daily life might be largely unchanged, but she will be transformed because she will no longer uncritically accept the injustices she confronts as given and she will have an inkling of a better alternative. Ideally, the philosophy classroom is the place where she has the time and space to engage in this transformation. But this transformation can only happen if philosophy not only arms her with the critical tools she will need but also with the ability to imagine and construct an alternative.

Many philosophers have persuasively criticized Rawls’ use of the original position as an argumentative tool. But we often forget, I think, how successfully it harnesses the power of the imagination to construct an alternative vision of what society could be like.

Allegory of the Cave, a centrepiece of many philosophy courses, develops a vision of people who live in a cave shackled so that they are only able to see the shadows in front of them. In class, this allegory is often used to consider the question of whether what we perceive as reality might not be but an imperfect version of the truth.

But the critical question Plato uses the allegory to consider is that of the obligation incurred by those who leave the cave and encounter the truth, the philosophers. He argues that their duty as citizens is to return armed with knowledge to help govern their city. Philosophers, according to Plato, are failing as citizens if they turn their back on those in the cave who are less fortunate.

Philosophy is not fiction and philosophers are notoriously suspicious of it. Plato is often read as being one of the staunchest critics of the imaginative arts, in particular poetry, because they have the power to corrupt and mislead the soul. Yet, Plato himself relies on his fantastic imagination in The Republic.

Descartes presents one of the most well-discussed arguments for scepticism – the view that we cannot have knowledge – by asking the reader to consider the possibility that she is dreaming. Instructors (myself included) will teach students how to dissect those arguments into premises and conclusions and how to evaluate them for validity and soundness.

When you’re tired and busy and overwhelmed with worry, you often do not have the luxury to consider these questions. You simply accept the challenges in front of you as those you must overcome. But in many cases these challenges are the result of your actions, the actions of others, social and political institutions, or a combination of all of these. Therefore, the first step in this kind of philosophical education is to shake students out of a complacent and uncritical acceptance of the world as it is.

This requires that it be both critical and imaginative. In order to do this, a philosophical education should go beyond showing students how to be critical thinkers: it must also teach students to imagine how the world could be different than it is and, in so doing, to consider better ways for them and the world to be.

philosophy is the antidote to the uncritical acceptance of the world and ourselves as we are. This answer falls squarely within the classical tradition of philosophy as an ethical and political enterprise. And if it is right, it is students like the one imagined above, with little time and few resources, who have the most to gain from philosophy, because it is they who stand to lose the most if the world stays as it is.

And why should they care about this kind of knowledge?

philosophy teaches you to think and write logically and clearly. This, we tell our students, will be of use to them no matter what path they pursue.

After class, you pick up your children from school. If you’re lucky, you can drop them off with a relative while you go to work. By the time you return home in the evening, you are tired, but still have many pages to read and assignments to complete. This is your gruelling daily routine.

Picture yourself as a young mother with two children. You enrol in university to obtain a bachelor’s degree, hoping to give yourself a better chance at a job that pays a living wage.