This session was created by Caroline Schaffalitzky de Muckadell, from the University of Southern Denmark.  She is part of the project Filosofi i Skolen, which The Philosophy Foundation is partnered with. Philosophy A central question in moral philosophy concerns what makes something morally wrong. Is it if the act harms others? If it ...

Stimulus Adapted from: Spiritual Story by Massud Farzan There was once a man who lived on the edge of a forest near a river. Every morning he saw a fox lying down by the river bank. The fox never got up and walked anywhere. How did it get food, the man wondered… why didn’t it just starve? Then one day, he had only walked a ...

Designed by Andy West Philosophy Addressed Should intolerant opinions be tolerated? (If yes, then what would happen? If no, then by what criterion do we censor?) What is the difference between disagreeing with someone and being intolerant of them? Is tolerance an absolute good? Preliminaries You may need to pre-teach the meanin...

Preparation Before you read the lesson plan do some thinking of your own. Have you ever tried to answer this question before: 'What is a number?' To help you with this, imagine you are speaking to an alien who is exactly like a human in terms of language and understanding but he/she/it lacks a concept of 'number' so the alien ...

BACKGROUND In Gulliver’s Travels the author Jonathan Swift makes fun of religious and sectarian differences. On the island of Lilliput, there is a deadly dispute between those that crack their boiled eggs on the more pointy end, and those that crack their eggs on the roundy end. The idea is to highlight how random and unimportant the di...

BACKGROUND More than a thousand years ago, Muslims from Africa conquered Spain and Portugal. They created their own country and forced the Christian kings out. Islam became the country’s religion. However, there were still many Jews and Christians living there. (2) They were not treated equally to Muslims, but they were tolerated by the...

Stimulus Write the following statements on the board and ask: Are these a) true, b) false, c) neither or d) both? 'I am 20. 'I am me.' 'The Simpsons is a really good programme.' 'I am shopping in Lewisham' (when the speaker is shopping, but not in Lewisham) 'This cake is made of jelly' (whe...

Stimulus Many years ago in Greece they held a competition to find the best painter. The people of Greece loved beauty in all its forms and tried to find the best in all things. Everyone agreed that there were 2 wonderful painters in the city of Athens, but nobody could decide which of the 2 painters was the better artist. Some people preferre...

This session was developed by specialist David Birch on the topic of Newspapers. You might want to run this along with the Knowledge session, using newspaper headlines as the sentences in the Knowledge session. Thinking Game Break the circle on 'lying'. Stimulus (Use the powerpoint attached to take you through the session.) ...