I think I was given this book to read because I'm having a slightly stroppy teenager on DDE that the idea waas that arguing and reflecting on philosophy would be a good thing for me to do.

And someone thought this would be a fun book for me to read.

I guess maybe I was 13 14 when someone gave me this on.

I read it and thought it was really interesting and from then on just just got more and more interested in it.

Do philosophy make you less stroppy?

I think philosophy might have enabled me to be Maur better October 2.

Better articulate my straw Penis.

So recently, what the department's been doing is taking out a Siri's off philosophy workshops.

If you like into local primary schools and the idea has been that we take a bit of research is done in the department on, we try and package it up into a small little workshop.

We go out into a primary school.

We run it for about one hour, and we have six of these.

So for a six week block, we're going out working with kids in the local area on teaching them really to engage in philosophy.

So, for instance, one of the sessions we work on is what is Beauty has a huge and really really difficult question to deal with.

So what we do to start with is we give them six pictures, we give them 10 minutes, we put them into groups and we say Order them from most beautiful to least beautiful on.

Then we'll have a chat and we'll we'll.

We'll talk about the philosophically interesting aspects of that so that we got the picture of a kitten.

And then we've got the picture of industrial power Station.

So the age of the kids we've worked with has varied a little bit.

We've worked with Children from about six or seven years old, right up to 11 years old, say no, no introduction needed for that picture.

Although they're almost universally, they think that this is not beautiful.

She's really ugly because because she's ugly on.

We have a picture of AH model taken from some magazine again, they tend to think that that's fairly ugly as well.

No, she's quite looking at my wife may be watching this video.

No, that's that's not her.

She's obviously far more beautiful than that.

So that's a picture of a rubbish dump.

Thank it's universal agreement.

Normally, they the kids react to start with a little bit of suspicion.

So here you are, this intruder coming into their school, they've never met you on often as well.

You know, you're coming from the university.

That could be a preconception about what that brings with it on.

Then you ask the first question on dhe straightaway.

They have all these fantastic ideas.

So again, talking about what is beauty, that they'll say things that we have a picture of a shiny sports car on, and typically, then the boys get really excited and they start coming up with these fantastic ideas about what might make that car a beautiful thing.

So it's shiny.

It's sick.

My mates Dad once saw one of these in the street in London that was really posh, but they're totally free wheeling and they'll draw connections all over the place.

It's really exciting to work with him.

Getting those those ideas back at something a bit more philosophically constrained requires that what we do is we get them back from their groups.

They've done this ordering.

They've worked out what the order of the pictures is from.

Least beautiful.

The most beautiful on then say right.

Okay, guys, Why?

What what?

What makes this thing more beautiful than that thing?

Why have you put them in the orders that you have if you like, justify your decisions are a huge part of philosophy is being ableto argue for an articulate your reasons for thinking that something is the case on So once we've got them engaged in that freewheeling exercise, it's in the case of right, Explain yourself.

Defend your view on dhe when you talk to other groups, a group of boys who put the sports car is most beautiful.

And then we have another picture in which there's a picture of a lovely sunset.

Sometimes, you know, it is inevitably group of boys with the car group of girls with the sunset.

Come on, guys.

Talk about it.

Who's right here?

Do you know what I'm gonna ask you to do now.

Go for it.

Ranks right now myself.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

So what do I think?

I think that probably is the most beautiful.

Yeah.

Okay, yeah.

Maybe gay in the car kind of station on the rubbish dump.

That's my order.

We think that there's no lower age limit on doing philosophy on.

We think that doing philosophy is just enormously valuable, just in and of itself.

Good philosophers are good at doing all sorts of other things on dhe.

Philosophy is just fantastically interesting.

So we think, Let's go out, talk to kids, get them doing the philosophy for themselves.

What was your role to be there?

Foot put hair, their hair about Lisa, sunset talk.

And then I put cats cute, not beautiful.

So I put the car there, and then I put it quite like Pat Station's parent station.

I think Typically Children start to be introduced to philosophy somewhere around 16.

17.

So sometimes they might get to do a philosophy A s level.

They might get a bit of critical thinking a little bit before that, which is sometimes connected to bits of philosophy, but at least typically philosophy just doesn't get into the curriculum beneath that kind of age range.

Practical teaches very busy teaching Children lots of other things.

So, yeah, I think it doesn't normally creep in until much later.

I think people are a disinclined to give philosophy to primary school age Children because there is this preconception that kicks around that in order to do philosophy, you've somehow gotta be just really, really clever.

You've gotta have this, Really?

Everybody gotta have a grasp of high level abstract principles.

Um, on dhe, I guess I think that pretty conceptions false.

I think just working with the seven year olds just shows me that that that that's not right.

There are a couple of really good reasons for getting philosophy in early ones just to do with the nature of the subject itself.

So one of the things that we go out on work with with the Children concerns morality and moral reasoning and thinking about what it is for a on act to be good as opposed to enact being being bad, these Children gotta grow up.

They've got to be adults.

They've got to learn to behave in a mature and reflective kind of ways, and I think that teaching them how to reason and work through their actions and think about what could a guiding principle they might like to employ that's fantastically useful.

I think that there's a real difference between the way that, say, a seven year old would engage the philosophical problem from the way that a first year undergraduate would engage with philosophical problem and then maybe a member of academic staff S o.

So let's start with the undergraduate, right?

Because the mind of a typical teaching kind of material, they come to us in their first year.

They've been taught a lot of things about how to write, how to think, how to perform.

And typically they've been asked to do that in a very structured kind of way.

When you start working with seven year olds in the primary school, you've got none of that, and it's brilliant.

They just you never ever know what is gonna come out next on Dhe from many points of view, that's awesome, because you have this little team then of 15 in the group who are attacking a philosophical problem from just just impossible angles angles that aren't gonna work angles that are, but they have no preconceptions where they should start.

So they just go from wherever they are.

And that's that's brilliant to work with.

Um, interestingly, colleagues ever kind of a mishmash of those two things.

Eso They've been taught how to think in very particular instructed kinds of ways, but typically because they're philosophers, they've also been trained in a sense to try and ignore a lot of that structure and just think about the issues as they are.

So I think if you mix a primary school philosopher with an underground with a bit more experience, you wind up with an academic philosopher.