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philosophersmag.com philosophersmag.com
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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.
I think that this article is a very good start and an introduction of philosophy, but personally I don't agree with some of the things it talks about: mainly the point that fiction is not important in philosophy. Almost the whole article was about some imaginary protagonist and how some certain scenarios (which haven't even happened yet) could affect other people. The whole article is immersed in fiction yet one of the main points of philosophy is to stay away from fiction. Seems hypocritcal.
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My teacher had our class re-enact a scenario very much like this one in class. We discussed the principles that would govern our imagined society before we picked our fate out of a hat. Until that point in my young life, I had never thought about justice in that way. The power of this exercise contributed in no small way to my becoming a philosopher. I have recreated a similar activity in various classes I have taught. The discussion it generates among students is reliably superb, but the best moment is when students discover their fate – whether they end up being a doctor or a garbage truck driver or a poor young mother – and have to reckon (at least for that class period) with their principles. 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.
Again this goes back to the idea of fiction in philosophy. (Same as previous comment).
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Not only is this exercise pedagogically engaging, but it leads students to develop proposals and to evaluate them critically.
Doesn't this contradict the idea of fiction in philosophy? The idea of the family dying won't actually happen and we are just testing out the fields of waters so the idea of fiction is actually very important in philosophy right? Fiction gives us the pathway to imagination which will help us to determine what are the pro and cons of the situation.
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philosophy is the antidote to the uncritical acceptance of the world and ourselves as we are
I think this is such a generic way of framing something so big that it gives so many interpretations. This gives so much interpretations since it seems to say that philosophy is the study of the world from OUR perspectives. Does this mean that philosophy is different to each person?
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Most of them are more fortunate than our imagined protagonist, but for many of them going to university involves great personal and financial sacrifices.
Clearly goes against the author's first paragraph, just doesn't make sense to me why the author would give such a specific example for the first paragraph when the author's students don't even fit into this category besides a few of them.
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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. Maybe you receive government loans to pay for tuition, and rely on your family’s help, but you still don’t have enough to pay for living expenses and childcare. So, you continue working at a job that pays slightly above minimum wage while taking a full load of courses. Every day you wake up early to get the children ready for school and commute an hour or more to university. 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.
Realistically though the chances of this happening are very little and especially for a person like me, a 17 year old man, this is pretty unrealistic. Yes it does set a good start to the article, but personally I feel that it should be more generic and a better hook or something to get me captured.
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