Go For Broke!

A philosophical inquiry workshop on risk-taking and peak experiences

Risk - featured image

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This workshop explores the ethics and phenomenology of risk-taking and peak experiences. With the help of purpose-made multimedia stimuli, it presents arresting case studies and inquiries including:

Video clip: Gever Tulley’s Tinkering School in which children are encouraged to take risks in order to become inquiring, self-directed, creative, imaginative, confident, and responsible problems-solvers.
Video clip: Climber Alex Honnold’s free solo ascent of Mexico’s rock wall El Sendero Luminoso, and his reflections on dealing with fear and visualising one’s own death.
Critical thinking activity: An exploration of conflicting views of extreme sports as either deviant/pathological, or as a source of peak experiences affording profound fulfilment, self-actualisation and a connection to the philosophical sublime. (We explore eight characteristics of peak experiences in depth.)
Video clips 1, 2, 3 & 4: Forrest Fenn’s multimillion dollar treasure hunt and its links with existentialist philosophy, life purpose, obsessiveness, addiction, danger to the public, harm, risk tolerance, moral duty and heroism.

This workshop tackles questions such as:

Is it ethical to take risks – even ones that endanger your own life?
Is it ethical to encourage others to take risks?
Under what circumstances should we support risk-taking?
What makes a risk reasonable, and what makes a risk reckless?
What makes something a moral duty?

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The following workshop materials are shared under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) for all original material. (Materials from other sources are clearly credited in the runsheet.)

Runsheet – Go For Broke! (100-110 mins)
Slideshow (PDF copy) – Go For Broke! (video & audio clips not included – to view these clips, use hyperlinks indicated on the runsheet)
Concept activity:
- Heading cards (to print and guillotine) and quote cards (to print, guillotine and distribute)
- Extreme sports quotes, randomised and sorted by subgroup (for facilitator’s reference)
- Proposed answer-sheet showing suggested solution to concept activity (for facilitator’s reference)

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This work is available free of charge, so that those who can’t afford it can still access it, and so that nobody has to pay before discovering it’s not what they are really seeking. But if you find it valuable and you’d like to contribute whatever easily affordable amount you feel it is worth, please leave a donation via Paypal below.