Our Programs

 In our programs, students learn the essential skills for participation in a community of inquiry. That is, they learn how to engage in the social and intellectual practice of exploring a question in a group, caring for the inquiry and its members, and exploring a space of hypotheses with humility and openness. Most of the topics we explore have a philosophical component, but many are also scientific, as insights from the sciences often inform philosophical explorations and vice-versa.

Our methods typically involve doing thought-experiments to collect observations about hypothetical cases that support or falsify a claim, and exploring the logical consequences of various positions.  In our discussions, students are encouraged to label their contributions to the inquiry (hypothesis, reason, counter-example, analogy, distinction, clarification, etc.) and fill out Inquiry Diagrams (shown above) to map out the discussion. Students develop analytical skills that generalize to intellectual explorations across philosophy and the sciences, as well as the fields of history, civics, mathematics, law, detective work, design, and most any endeavor to explore possible solutions to a problem.

In this program, students explore data on climate change and explore debates about the influence of past, present, and future human activity on the climate. Students are given scenarios (hypothetical and actual) and discuss what should be done. For example, should a person take a job if it requires air travel? What if the job involves air travel for the purpose of protecting the rights of animals or children? Is it morally acceptable for children to ‘go on strike’ to protest for environmental policy change? Do people without children have an obligation to the environment? Is it morally permissible to travel by air purely for leisure?

What is knowledge? What do illusions, magic tricks, and cognitive biases reveal about our brains? What do babies know and how do they learn? Can robots ever have knowledge, and if so what can they know? In this program, students engage in philosophical inquiry on these classic and contemporary puzzles about knowledge. Each session begins with a game of Name That Bias (in which students have to guess the cognitive bias illustrated by a scenario). Then there is a short lesson on a topic having to do with perception, reasoning, memory, babies, or robots, followed by an inquiry on a question chosen either by the students or the instructors. 

In this program, students engage in philosophical inquiry into classic and contemporary puzzles about consciousness. These questions include: Do colors look the same to you as they do to other people, and what about flavors and the sensation of pain? Could robots ever have conscious experiences, and if so what might they be like? What is it about human brains that allows us to have conscious experiences? Is there a way for science to someday allow us to know what the experiences of others are like? Each session begins with a game of Name That Fallacy (in which students have to guess the reasoning fallacy illustrated by a scenario). Then there is a short lesson on a topic having to do with vision, taste, multi-sensory perception, attention, self-awareness, brains, or robots, followed by an inquiry on a question chosen either by the students or the instructors. 

In this program, students participate in the National High School Ethics Bowl. (We are in the process of creating a middle-school league as well.) A member from our team serves as a coach for a team from a Bay Area high school. In the Fall, a set of cases is released and students meet to discuss them, agree on a position for the team on the issue, and its best supporting reasons and challenges. In the Spring, there is a regional competition that rewards teams that articulate their positions, consider the major positions one might take, and defend their positions as the most reasonable. Winning regional teams go on to compete nationally. Unlike High School Debate competitions, this is a cooperative competition, in which students are rewarded for their ability to listen, be respectful of various positions, and make progress toward solutions.

Which news is fake news? What might motivate someone to write or publish fake news? How should we interpret social media posts by our friends and celebrities? In this program, students discuss these issues and consider actual examples of news and social media postings. They are given a set of tools to begin to fact-check the items and are encouraged to create new tools and tests of their own. Students also create their own fake news articles and social media posts to see why and how someone might want to manipulate and mislead with information.

This program was inspired by the book Sleights of Mind, about the neuroscience of magic.  Students become critical thinkers as the see many of the ways in which our minds are fooled by magicians and optical illusions. Students also learn about the workings of the brain by looking at its boundries as exploited by magicians,  from sensation and perception, to attention, memory, and social cues, and even biases in our assumptions about probability.  Simple magic tricks are revealed and students practice performing and creating them as part of their mastery over the mind's natural errors. [Logo by Tom Interval intervalmagic.com]

In this program, students explore paradoxes about happiness and practice elements of Aristotle’s account of virtue. Students develop their own characters by selecting virtues they want to practice mastering (generosity, bravery, honesty, persistence, etc.) and find their own balance in acheiving them (e.g., placing generosity somewhere between being too giving and being too selfish), and work to become skilled at behaving in ways that are closer to their own ideals.

This program uses Raymond Smullyan's puzzles about Knights and Knaves as a fun way for kids to sharpen their critical thinking skills. On the Island of Knights and Knaves, knights can only speak the truth and knaves can only speak falsehoods. For example, in one puzzle, a visitor to the island meets inhabitants A and B. Inhabitant A says, "All of us are knaves" and inhabitant B says, "Exactly one of us is a knave". Students must deduce from this information whether B is a knight or a knave. Ultimately, the puzzles lead kids into an understanding of Gödel's incompleteness theorem about language and truth.

This program explores philosophical puzzles about robots. There will be several robots in the classroom for free-play exploration and thought experiments will be raised as stimuli. Questions raised will include: How do we know when something has a mind? Could a machine like Aibo (Sony’s robotic pet dog) ever be a better pet than a real dog? Could Aibo ever really understand the word ‘sit’? Could Aibo ever really experience the color pink (the color of its ball), and what is pink look like to it? Could Aibo ever really be a ‘good doggie’? Will there come a day when we have moral obligations toward machines? Will there come a day when machines have moral responsibility to us and other beings?