SOPHIA’s Executive Director Eric Thomas Weber created this SOPHIA one-sheet for the facilitation of a conversation with the Albuquerque Philosophy Collective, our SOPHIA Chapter in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The prompts on this one-sheet consider both current matters involving education in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, as well as broader, continuing crises in education concerning real problems as well as problems of misunderstanding concerning education.
Thanks to spoilt.exile for permission to share this photo.
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted nations around the world to make sudden and radical changes to schooling practices in the spring of 2020. For a generation prior to the pandemic, scholars and critics of all stripes have proclaimed a variety of crises in education, from questions of whether students are learning anything and are being “left behind” to concerns over inequality and inadequacy of school funding. In 2020, the health crisis saw kids returned home without plans for how parents and guardians would care for their children and the economic effects of the virus and quarantining practices put many people out of work. There have emerged two narratives of crisis in education, then, one long-standing concern over how best to educate people and another about education in times of crisis. This SOPHIA one-sheet presents two prompts, which can either be considered in sequence or separately, in two different meetings.
Special thanks go to the Albuquerque Philosophy Collective and especially to Ty Camp for prompting the creation of this one-sheet and inviting Executive Director Weber to meet with their dynamic and energetic SOPHIA chapter in September of 2020!
If you could get away with something that is considered wrongdoing, but seems like it would be to your advantage, would you be able to resist doing it? This SOPHIA One-Sheet addresses this question in reference to the story about Gyges’ Ring in Plato’s Republic.
This One-Sheet is based on a prompt shared by the Center for Philosophy for Children at the University of Washington, and is used with permission from Dr. Jana Mohr Lone. The first side of the one-sheet features the original prompt and the second side of the sheet is a list of questions drafted by Lexington SOPHIA Chapter members Caroline A. Buchanan, Derek Daskalakes, Erik Jarvis, William James Lincoln, and Eric Thomas Weber. The group will be trying out the One-Sheet on Tuesday, October 16th at the Good Foods Co-op in Lexington, KY, and may post a revised version after the meeting.
In this 67th episode of the Philosophy Bakes Bread radio show and podcast, Eric Thomas Weber and Anthony Cashio talk with Dr. Marilyn Fischer about “Jane Addams and Democratic Activism.” Dr. Fischer is a Professor Emerita at the University of Dayton where she specializes in political philosophy and American Pragmatism. She focuses especially on Jane Addams’s philosophy.
Listen for our “You Tell Me!” questions and for some jokes in one of our concluding segments, called “Philosophunnies.” Reach out to us on Facebook @PhilosophyBakesBread and on Twitter @PhilosophyBB; email us at philosophybakesbread@gmail.com; or call and record a voicemail that we play on the show, at 859.257.1849. Philosophy Bakes Bread is a production of the Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA). Check us out online at PhilosophyBakesBread.com and check out SOPHIA at PhilosophersInAmerica.com.
Sudio.com, a high quality headphone company, offers a 15% site-wide promotional discount if you use the code that we mention in the show (around minute 13 and a half).
On mirror neurons, see Lea Winerman, “The Mind’s Mirror,” Monitor on Psychology 36, Issue 9 (October 2005).
Recent protests calling attention to police brutality have taken the form of kneeling during the playing of the national anthem at football games and other sporting events. Episode 53 of Philosophy Bakes Bread, on “Kneeling and Civil Protest,” with Dr. Arnold Farr, focused on the criticisms and defenses of players for their protests, as well as the message that protesters have tried to convey. SOPHIA member and UKY graduate student James William Lincoln created a SOPHIA One-Sheet document about the episode for use in local or online discussions about the topic.
In July of 2018, Dr. Farr kindly joined leaders of the Lexington SOPHIA Chapter to hold a meeting testing out the one-sheet document that Lincoln created, and the meeting was a great success. We encourage other chapters to try out a meeting on the basis of this document. Those who wish can also listen to the radio and podcast episode on which the sheet was based. The idea behind the one-sheet, however, is that people don’t have to have heard the episode in order to join in a rich discussion about current and important matters for people to consider today. You can download a printable Adobe PDF version of the one-sheet document here, or by clicking on the image of the one-sheet above.
In this 66th episode of the Philosophy Bakes Bread radio show and podcast, Eric Thomas Weber and Anthony Cashio had the pleasure to talk with self-taught philosopher John Altmann (a.k.a. Adrian Alba), who has been engaging in independent philosophical scholarship since 2010. We talk with John about “Disability and Popular Culture.”
John is a regular contributor to the Popular Culture and Philosophy book series. He is a member of the European Network of Japanese Philosophy. He is also a field editor for the Public Philosophy Journal. John is an active public thinker also in his writings on Facebook and Twitter, on the latter of which he is known as @Iron_Intellect. John published a powerful piece in The New York Times, called “I Don’t Want to Be Inspiring,” which was about disability and the ways in which people will often refer to persons with disabilities as being “so inspiring!”
Eric and Anthony both had the chance to meet John at the 2018 gathering of the Public Philosophy Network in Boulder, Colorado this past February, where John gave a powerful paper about the profession of philosophy, called “The Disabled Can Speak: Socratic Midwifery as a Means of Resisting Epistemic Violence.” In addition to that well received paper, John has also written for volumes such as Dracula and Philosophy, The European Journal of Japanese Philosophy, Deadpool and Philosophy, Hippo Reads, and the Blog of the American Philosophical Association, where he wrote about Charlottesville.
Listen for our “You Tell Me!” questions and for some jokes in one of our concluding segments, called “Philosophunnies.” Reach out to us on Facebook @PhilosophyBakesBread and on Twitter @PhilosophyBB; email us at philosophybakesbread@gmail.com; or call and record a voicemail that we play on the show, at 859.257.1849. Philosophy Bakes Bread is a production of the Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA). Check us out online at PhilosophyBakesBread.com and check out SOPHIA at PhilosophersInAmerica.com.
Anthony Cashio, “Liberating the Liberal Arts: Encouraging Philosophical Engagement Outside of the Classroom,” on our 2018 SOPHIA panel at the Public Philosophy Network conference in Boulder, CO.
