Year 10 Philosophy

Hello Programme

Name: __________________________________________

Welcome to Year 10 Philosophy!

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Philosophy in Year 10 is a semester-long subject. Since many of you have only a basic familiarity with it,
this course is very much an orientation into the various areas of the discipline. Every week we will be
introduced to a new philosophical question, with associated readings and activities. Assessment tasks (of
which there are three, as well as an end-of-semester exam) will take place after each major unit we cover.
Whether you decide to keep a hand-written exercise book or work primarily on a computer is your choice,
but please have your work available at all times for me to check. Additionally, divide your work into the
appropriate sections and have a glossary page (as we will come across many new vocabulary words). Year
10 Philosophy will also have a Google Classroom page, where I will post work, links, notes, etc.
This is a simple outline of the course over 13 weeks:

Week One: How do I think? (Logic: definitions, arguments, syllogisms, and logical fallacies.)
Week Two: Who am I? (Metaphysics: essentialism and existentialism.)
Week Three: Who am I? (Metaphysics: the mind-body problem.)
Week Four: Who am I? (Metaphysics: free will and determinism.)
Week Five: Assessment task one.
Week Six: What is real? (Metaphysics: materialism, dualism and idealism.)
Week Seven: What is real? (Metaphysics: the existence of God.)
Week Eight: What is real? (Metaphysics: the nature of time.)
Week Nine: Assessment task two.
Week Ten: How should I live? (Ethics: moral statements and approaches.)
Week Eleven: How should I live? (Ethics: theories of how to live the good life.)
Week Twelve: How should I live? (Ethics: justice, human rights and the law.)
Week Thirteen: Assessment task three.
Week Fourteen: What do I value? (Aesthetics: the concept of beauty.)
Week Fifteen: What do I value? (Aesthetics: art and music.)
Week Sixteen: Exam revision.
Exam: Assessment task four.

You will have a choice of assessment tasks throughout Terms One and Two. They will often take the form
of short-answer questions, extended responses, essays, a presentation or debate, or more creative activities.

What is Philosophy – and what’s

it for?
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People are understandably confused about what philosophy is. From a distance, it seems weird, irrelevant,
boring and yet also – just a little – intriguing. But it’s hard to put a finger on what the interest really is. What
are philosophers? What do they do? And why does one need them?

Luckily, the answer is already contained in the word philosophy itself. In Greek, philo means love – or
devotion – and sophia means wisdom. Philosophers are people devoted to wisdom.

Though a rather abstract term, the concept of ‘wisdom’ isn’t mysterious. Being wise means attempting to
live and die well, leading as good a life as possible within the troubled conditions of existence. The goal of
wisdom is fulfilment. You could perhaps say ‘happiness’ but ‘happiness’ is misleading, for it suggests
continuous chirpiness and joy, whereas ‘fulfilment’ seems compatible with a lot of pain and suffering, which
every decent life must by necessity have.

So a philosopher or ‘person devoted to wisdom’ is someone who strives for systematic expertise at working
out how one may best find individual and collective fulfilment.

In their pursuit of wisdom, philosophers have developed a very specific skill-set. They have, over the
centuries, become experts in many of the general, large things that make people not very wise. Six central
ones have been identified:

1. We don’t ask big questions.

What is the meaning of life? What should I do with my work? Where are we going as a society? What is
love? Most of us have these questions in our minds at some point (often in the middle of the night), but we
despair of trying to answer them. They have the status of jokes in most social circles: and we get shy of
expressing them (except for brief moments in adolescence) for fear of being thought pretentious and of
getting nowhere.

But these questions matter deeply because only with sound answers to them can we direct our energies
meaningfully.

Philosophers are people unafraid of the large questions. They have, over the centuries, asked the very
largest. They realise that these questions can always be broken down into more manageable chunks and that
the only really pretentious thing is to think one is above regularly raising naive-sounding enquiries.

2. We are vulnerable to errors of common

sense.

Public opinion – or what gets called ‘common sense’ – is

sensible and reasonable in countless areas. It’s what you
hear about from friends and neighbours, the stuff that’s
just assumed to be true, the stuff you take in without even
thinking about it. The media pumps it out by the gallon
every day. But in some cases, common sense is also full of
daftness, error and the most lamentable prejudice.

Philosophy gets us to submit all aspects of common sense to reason. It wants us to think for ourselves, to be
more independent. Is it really true what people say about love, about money, about children, about travel,
about work? Philosophers are interested in asking whether an idea is logical – rather than simply assuming it
must be right because it is popular and long-established.

3. We are mentally confused.

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We’re not very good at knowing what goes on in our own minds. We know we really like a piece of music.
But we struggle to say quite why. Or someone we meet is very annoying, but we can’t pin down what the
issue is. Or we lose our temper, but can’t readily tell what we’re so cross about. We lack insight into our
own satisfactions and dislikes.

That’s why we need to examine our own minds. Philosophy is committed to self-knowledge – and its central
precept – articulated by the earliest, greatest philosopher, Socrates – is just two words long: Know yourself.

4. We have muddled ideas about what will make us happy.

We’re powerfully set on trying to be happy, but go wrong in our search for it on a regular basis. We overrate
the power of some things to improve our lives – and underrate others. In a consumer society, we make the
wrong choices because, guided by false glamour, we keep on imagining that a particular kind of holiday, or
car, or computer will make a bigger difference than it can. At the same time, we underestimate the
contribution of other things – like going for a walk, tidying a cupboard, having a structured conversation or
going to bed early – which may have little prestige but can contribute deeply to the character of existence.

Philosophers seek to be wise by getting more precise about the activities and attitudes that really can help
our lives to go better.

5. Our emotions can send us in dangerous directions.

We are inescapably emotional beings but regularly

forget this uncomfortable fact. Occasionally certain
emotions – certain kinds of anger, envy or resentment
– lead us into serious trouble. Philosophers teach us to
think about our emotions, rather than simply have
them. By understanding and analysing our feelings,
we learn to see how emotions impact on our
behaviour in unexpected, counterintuitive and
sometimes dangerous ways. Philosophers were the
first therapists.

6. We panic and lose perspective.

We are constantly losing a sense of what matters and

what doesn’t. We are – as the expression goes – constantly ‘losing perspective’. That’s what philosophers
are good at keeping a hold of. On hearing the news that he’d lost all his possessions in a shipwreck, the Stoic
philosopher Zeno simply said: ‘Fortune commands me to be a less encumbered philosopher.’ It’s responses
like these that have made the very term ‘philosophical’ a byword for calm, long-term thinking and strength-
of-mind, in short, for perspective.

What we call the ‘history of philosophy‘ is made up of repeated attempts over the centuries to address ways
in which we are unwise. So, for example, in ancient Athens, Socrates paid special attention to the problem of
how people get confused in their minds. He was struck that people didn’t quite know what they meant by
key ideas – like courage or justice or success – even though these were the main ideas they used when
talking about their own lives. Socrates developed a method (which still bears his name) by which you can
learn to get clearer about what you mean by playing devil’s advocate with any idea. The aim isn’t
necessarily to change your mind. It is to test whether the ideas guiding your life are sound.

A few decades later, the philosopher Aristotle tried

to make us more confident around big questions. He
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thought that the best questions were those that ask what something is for. He did this a lot and over many
books, asked: What is government for? What is the economy for? What is money for? What is art for? Today
he would be encouraging us to ask questions like: What is the news media for? What is marriage for? What
are schools for? What is pornography for?

Also active in Ancient Greece were the Stoic philosophers, who were interested in panic. The Stoics noticed
a really central feature of panic: we panic not just when something bad occurs, but when it does so
unexpectedly, when we were assuming that everything was going to go rather well. So they suggested that
we should arm ourselves against panic by getting used to the idea that danger, trouble and difficulty are very
likely to occur at every turn.

The overall task of studying philosophy is to absorb these and many other lessons and put them to work in
the world today. The point isn’t just to know what this or that philosopher happened to say, but to aim to
exercise wisdom at an individual and societal level – starting now.

The wisdom of philosophy is – in modern times – mostly delivered in the form of books. But in the past,
philosophers sat in market squares and discussed their ideas with shopkeepers or went into government
offices and palaces to give advice. It wasn’t abnormal to have a philosopher on the payroll. Philosophy was
thought of as a normal, basic activity – rather than as an unusual, esoteric, optional extra.

Nowadays, it’s not so much that we overtly deny this thought – we are always getting snippets of wisdom
here and there – but we just don’t have the right institutions set up to promulgate wisdom coherently in the
world. In the future, though, when the value of philosophy is a little clearer, we can expect to meet more
philosophers in daily life. They won’t be locked up, living mainly in university departments, because the
points at which our unwisdom bites – and messes up our lives – are multiple and urgently need attention
right now.

After reading the article, respond to the following:

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 1. How is philosophy or the activity of philosophers defined?

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2. What are the six problems that people generally have that make them unwise?

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3. Note down some philosophers mentioned in the article.

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4. What are some questions a philosopher might ask?

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5. According to the article, how do we live a life of wisdom?

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6. What do you think about the article’s conclusions?

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Branches of Philosophy
Philosophers are interested in addressing some very important questions in life. They also like to categorise
these questions and their responses to them, and these can be understood as the branches or areas of
philosophy. Using the PowerPoint, video and other research, fill in the tables below. For each of the branches,
write (a) what it is concerned in studying, and (b) 2-3 questions it might ask about the world.

Logic

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 Ethics

Aesthetics

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 Schools of Philosophy
As well as the various branches of philosophy, there are also many philosophical schools.
These schools are almost like sports teams in philosophy, started by a specific philosopher,
and then continued by their supporters over the centuries. Choose five of the schools below
and write down who began it. Have you heard of any of these before?

Pythagoreanism Cynicism
Platonism (Middle and Scholasticism
Neoplatonism)
Humanism
Aristotelianism
Pragmatism
Stoicism
Positivism
Scepticism
Marxism
Epicureanism
Existentialism
Hedonism
Phenomenology
Postmodernism

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 Philosophical Principles and Tools
Just as mathematicians have basic laws of arithmetic (for example, a negative number
multiplied by a negative number always results in a positive number, -5 X -5 = 25) or science
uses experiments to verify hypotheses, so philosophers too use laws or principles of thinking,
as well as tools to help them work.
Write down the definition of each of the following and an example that illustrates your
understanding:

The Law of Identity of Indiscernibles

The Principle of Non-Contradiction

The Principle of Excluded Middle

The Principle of Sufficient Reason

The Principle of Charity

“Ought Implies Can”

Ockham’s Razor

Thought Experiments

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Analogies

Philosopher Research and Presentation

Briefly research one of the philosophers below. Once you have found some information on
the philosopher, fill in the Google Docs table that will be shared with the class. In our first
lesson back next year, we will share out findings in a short (2-3 minute) presentation.
For the philosopher you choose, find:
 One key fact about his/her life.
 One key contribution he/she made to philosophy.
 One other interesting fact.

Socrates (d. 399 BC) Jean-Jacques Rousseau (AD 1712 – AD

1778)
Plato (423 BC – 347 BC)
Mary Wollstonecraft (AD 1759 – 1797)
Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC)
Immanuel Kant (AD 1724 – AD 1804)
Augustine of Hippo (AD 354 – AD 430)
Soren Kierkegaard (AD 1813 – AD 1855)
Thomas Aquinas (AD 1225 – AD 1274)
Friedrich Nietzsche (AD 1844 – AD 1900)
William of Ockham (AD 1285 – AD 1347)
John Stuart Mill (AD 1806 – AD 1873)
René Descartes (AD 1596 – AD 1650)
William James (AD 1842 – AD 1910)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (AD 1646 –
AD 1716) Ludwig Wittgenstein (AD 1889 – AD
1951)
Baruch Spinoza (AD 1632 – AD 1677)
Jean Paul Sartre (AD 1905 – AD 1980)
John Locke (AD 1632 – AD 1704)
Simone de Beauvoir (AD 1908 – AD
George Berkeley (AD 1685 – AD 1753)
1986)
David Hume (AD 1711 – AD 1776)
Hannah Arendt (AD 1906 – AD 1975)

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Holiday homework: Complete the research, Google Docs table and
presentation (as well as any unfinished work from the Hello Programme).

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