Concerned about climate change? Worried about environmental degradation? Want to protect local wildlife? Then you should think twice before purchasing a pet.
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(more…)This post is the third 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.
Last month, the Iranian opposition and the Islamic Republic took parallel steps to restructure the political landscape and gather support. On March 10, China announced it had negotiated a deal between the Islamic Republic and Saudi Arabia to ease escalating tensions; on the same day, the “Mahsa Charter” (available in English and Persian) designed to unite the opposition around a common minimal platform for a transition to a secular democracy was released. While international news outlets covered the diplomatic deal extensively, not a single article was dedicated to the Mahsa Charter in major American and European newspapers. This post’s goal is therefore to introduce readers to this charter and analyze it. Since the Mahsa Charter will be new to most readers and is very dense, this post will be quite lengthy.
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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.)
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.
(more…)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.
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.
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?
(more…)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.
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’.
(more…)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.
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.
(more…)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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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. (more…)
