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...

PHILOSOPHY A central question in philosophy of mind concerns what consciousness is. A wellknown though experiment asks if one could imagine a philosophical zombie that was just like a person, but without self-awareness. This experiment opens up a lot of philosophical questions about metaphysics (Would it make that someone could act as a norma...

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...

Unicorn Horns - thinking about things that don’t exist This is a development of ‘Nobody’s home’ from The If Odyssey and is designed to get the class thinking about non-existent entities. These include fictional characters of all kinds, but they also include some more controversial examples such as Santa Claus and the T...

Stimulus There were once five students studying together in a famous and important university. They were reading their holy book and came to the point where it says ‘We must thank God for the bad things as well as the good ones’. They were puzzled, and took their question to the Professor. ‘We understand the part about th...

Designed by Steven Campbell-Harris Starter activity: 'change places if' with a colour focus (change places if your favourite colour is.., change places if you think black is not a colour, change places if you are wearing something blue etc) Main activity: A short poem/Thoughting to read aloud (possibly with the prop of ...