Justice Everywhere

a blog about philosophy in public affairs

Category: General Page 1 of 12

Teaching through experiences – Interview with Stephen Bloch-Schulman

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On 27 March, 2023

In Education, General, Pedagogy, Teaching, Teaching Philosophy

A photograph of a traditional seminar-style discussion.
A traditional classroom scene

The way I like to put it is students in a philosophy classroom are regularly given answers without having the questions, and by having that experience first they have a bunch of questions they can then bring to the text.

Professor Stephen Bloch-Schulman, Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Elon University, has published extensively on teaching and learning, especially in relation to the practice of teaching philosophy. Like many philosophers, he wants students to critically evaluate their beliefs. However, his approach to actually getting students to do so can be considered unusual – as he does not think people generally are great at explaining what they believe. For our series on Teaching Philosophy, Justice Everywhere interviewed Bloch-Schulman about his teaching philosophy and practice.

(The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

Justice Everywhere (JE): So, what do you do that you think is interesting and worth sharing?

Stephen Bloch-Schulman (SBS): I’m quite taken with Eric Schwitzgebel’s critique of intellectualism about belief – as he understands it, the intellectualist view is that we can know what our beliefs are by simply looking inside our own thinking, that we are transparent to ourselves.

I think the opposite is true, I think that we are very opaque to ourselves. I’m not really interested in merely asking my students what they believe and then critically examining what they say, because I don’t actually think that that’s what they believe. What I’m trying to do instead is find ways that students can reveal their beliefs to themselves and to me, rather than asking and assuming what they say accurately reflects their beliefs. I construct all sorts of experiences for them to have wherein they will reveal to themselves, and to me, what their beliefs are without them knowing that that is what they are doing.

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Student use of ChatGPT in higher education: focus on fairness

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On 20 March, 2023

In General, Teaching, Teaching Philosophy

From the long-form essay to concise term definitions, ChatGPT can be an apt tool for students in completing various assignments. Yet many educators balk at its use: they emphasize that ChatGPT makes errors, claim that its use is cheating, and that students using it learn nothing.

What sorts of policies should educators adopt? Our options fall into three main categories:
1) Explicitly forbid the use of ChatGPT.

2) Have no explicit policy: ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’.

3) Explicitly allow the use of ChatGPT.

In this post, I look at these three options from the perspective of fairness. Since fairness thrives on transparency, 3) seems to me the fairest of them all.

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More of a Royalist than the King and More of a Republican than Robespierre: Tensions between Radical Monarchists and Republicans in the Iranian Diaspora

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On 6 March, 2023

In General

This post is the second in a series entitled: “The Mahsa Revolution: A Political Philosophy and Futures Studies Perspective”

The goal of this series is to offer readers reflections on the on-going grassroots, women-led revolutionary movement in Iran, to be continued until its completion or the mutual exhaustion of readers and author. I will analyze, for non-Persian speakers, debates and initiatives regarding the future of Iran from a philosophical and futures studies perspective. Every revolutionary moment unlocks the space of the politically and socially conceivable and enables the hopeless to exercise their rusted capacity for imagining better futures. It also reveals normative disagreements on desirable futures, inclusion and exclusion from those futures, and strategies suitable for realizing them. Although I am not an Iranologist, my hope is to give readers a candid glimpse of the burgeoning forward-looking democratic life of Iranians in Iran and the diaspora. 

“Protesters in Dusseldorf, Germany carrying a portrait of the late Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on February 11, 2023” Image from IranInternational

While hundreds of Iranian schoolgirls are hospitalized because a mysterious group (probably agents of the Islamic Republic or radicals protected by it) commits chemical attacks on their schools to terrorize them and punish them for protesting the mandatory veil and dictatorship, the diaspora quarrels over the form of Iran’s future regime. During the last few weeks, more and more incidents (in demonstrations and online) oppose monarchists to republicans, with verbal abuse and occasional skirmishes. How can we make sense of such a worrisome trend when support for the Mahsa revolution is vital and maintaining the recently gained unity among opponents in the diaspora indispensable if we want to convince the world that we represent a credible and tolerant alternative to Islamists? 

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Turning Fear Into Anxiety

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On 27 February, 2023

In General

Zsuzsanna Chappell argues that the transformation of fear into anxiety is another example of how the concerns of some members of society are systematically dismissed.

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Ukraine Benefit Conference: ‘What Good is Philosophy? The Role of the Academy in a Time of Crisis’

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On 23 February, 2023

In Academia, General, International, Public Philosophy, War

Aaron Wentland (Vision Fellow in Public Philosophy at King’s College London) is organizing a major online benefit event for the Ukrainian academy on 17 and 18 March, entitled: ‘What Good Is Philosophy? – The Role of the Academy in a Time of Crisis’.

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Visions of desirable futures for Iran after the Mahsa revolution

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On 20 February, 2023

In Democracy, Gender, General, International

This post is part of a series entitled: “The Mahsa revolution: a political philosophy and futures studies perspective”

The goal of this series is to offer readers reflections on the on-going grassroots, women-led revolutionary movement in Iran, to be continued until its completion or the mutual exhaustion of readers and author. I will analyze, for non-Persian speakers, debates and initiatives regarding the future of Iran from a philosophical and futures studies perspective. Every revolutionary moment unlocks the space of the politically and socially conceivable and enables the hopeless to exercise their rusted capacity for imagining better futures. It also reveals normative disagreements on desirable futures, inclusion and exclusion from those futures, and strategies suitable for realizing them. Although I am not an Iranologist, my hope is to give readers a candid glimpse of the burgeoning forward-looking democratic life of Iranians in Iran and the diaspora. 

(Image: Touraj Saberivand)

Introduction to “Visions of desirable futures for Iran after the Mahsa revolution“

What visions of a post-Islamist future Iran animate the Mahsa revolution? Its slogans are clear: secularism, gender equality, and democracy. Aren’t these aspirations dull compared to the anti-imperialistic and Islamist ideologies of the 1979 revolution? Four decades of life under totalitarianism have immunized Iranians against radical ideologies. Yet Iranians have aspirations that deserve to be heard and engaged with. Based on what I have informally gathered from discussions on social media, independent Iranian news outlets, countless videos of Gen Z demonstrators who elaborate on their anger and desires, I see four frequent visions of the future of Iran. 

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Listening to executive dysfunction

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On 16 January, 2023

In General, Health

Chatting with an UK psychologist over a pint, I asked if the UK, like my native Finland, currently struggles to accommodate the large number of women coming to the clinic with ADHD symptoms. He confirmed it did, and so does The Guardian, headlining “ADHD services ‘swamped’, say experts as more UK women seek diagnosis”. Likewise, the New York Post declaims how women “are diagnosing themselves with neurodivergent conditions such as ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) after watching trending TikTok videos”.

ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disability characterized by differences in sustained attention, impulse control, and motor activity. Not all symptoms need to be present for all patients: symptom presentation can differ among people with ADHD. In the 1980s and 1990s, responses to this heterogeneity have included the advent of concepts such as ADD (attention deficit disorder without hyperactivity) and ADHD ‘subtypes’. However, neither subtypes nor a differential ADD diagnosis are any longer recognized, and it is instead accepted that ADHD presents in many different ways.


Source: social media meme

In the 1980s, ADHD was conceived of mainly as a disorder of motor hyperactivity, as a disorder that only affects children, and that mainly affects boys. However, we now know that for some people with ADHD, their symptoms persist to adulthood, although the symptom presentation may change. We also now understand that ADHD has long been underdiagnosed in girls and women.

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The Ethics of Keeping Pets: Why Love is Not Enough

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On 9 January, 2023

In Animals, Duties, General, Moral values

photo of man hugging tan dogPhoto by Eric Ward on Unsplash

I have been thinking about the ethics of keeping sentient animals as pets. As someone who has lived with dogs, cats, rats, mice, gerbils, rabbits, lizards, guinea pigs, and chickens, I have experienced first-hand the joy and companionship that such creatures can bring to our lives and the love that we can have for them. Yet, as a philosopher interested in animal ethics, I am aware of the many moral problems associated with our practice of keeping animals as pets. These problems have led me to reconsider human-animal companionship, and I have come to think that no matter how much we might love the animals we bring into our homes, we cannot justify doing so.

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Do you think you can do politics innocently?

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On 26 December, 2022

In General, Public Philosophy

There are many illuminating ways to understand politics, but one is as the practice of attempting to shape and direct the collective life of one’s community. Those who do politics typically seek to influence the collective life of the community with what they regard as morally good objectives in mind. Hence, at least according to this understanding of politics, outcomes matter enormously.

This goes part of the way to explaining why consequentialism is an approach to morality that has such purchase in politics. Simplifying a bit, consequentialism is the view that the moral rightness of an act depends only on its consequences.

Perhaps the most well-known objection to consequentialism is that it seems to permit acts which most people believe are obviously morally wrong. Familiar examples of such acts include lying, breaking promises, failing to show gratitude or loyalty, and imposing harm on others. This implication is typically illustrated via highly unrealistic thought experiments, but let me use three quite different recent examples from British politics instead.

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How could paternalism ever be a good thing?

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On 5 December, 2022

In Children, Education, Gender, General, Governance, Health, Liberty

NobodyWantsToGoWhereIWantToLeadThem.png

Recently, as I was discussing with a friend of mine, the conversation brought us to the issue of paternalism. Taking the bad habit of playing the philosopher’s role, I said something like “You know, paternalism is actually not always wrong.” My friend reacted very surprised – as if I had said “You know, patriarchy is actually not always wrong.” And as it happens, for her, “paternalism” and “patriarchy” were closely linked – which I had never considered before.

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