Recent Articles
Drop your tools!
There was no more firefighting to be done. It was time to run for their lives. What happened next was a lesson in how people make decisions under pressure. What can practitioners of philosophical inquiry learn from the Mann Gulch wildfire tragedy, and from the desperate ingenuity of one member of the firefighting crew?
Could do better: Exam questions fail
Year 12 students are not the only ones flummoxed by questions on the HSC English exam. In certain exam questions, the radically different tasks of literary analysis and argument analysis have been unceremoniously jammed together. How are students to respond when they can’t fathom what is being asked of them? Have the exam writers produced ambiguous questions on purpose, and if so, to what end?
Above the fray
Without common standards for what counts as a reliable method of inquiry, we won’t be able to agree on facts, let alone on values. Since we often have to decide, jointly, what to do in the face of disagreement, we need an epistemic common currency, and we need to be able to give reasons for why only certain epistemic principles should be part of that currency. (Extracts from an article by Michael P. Lynch)
The Philosophy Club 