By Steve Hoggins The idea for the characters of Critu and Aris is taken from David Birch’s entries in 'The Philosophy Shop', edited by peter Worley. Ed Weijers and his colleague Eef Cornelisson, who I met through the SOPHIA network, inspired the ‘alive or not alive?’ question. Set up Gather some objects and/...

By Steve Hoggins This is inspired Morag and Berys Gaut’s book, Philosophy for Young Children. It also draws from ‘who gets what and why?’ by Anja Steinbauer in The Philosophy Shop. Resources 3 Puppets Scissors Circle of thin card or paper plate Themes This story can be a continuation of the He...

Here's a shockingly simple way, thought up by David Birch to generate some intriguing and unusual ethical questions for a provocative discussion - created by chance.   Method Take two hats and put six cards with nouns in one hat, six verbs in another.  Then place something on the floor with the following written ...

Ever since Socrates, philosophers have tried to define terms clearly and exhaustively. This has resulted in a good deal of rigour and precision. Philosophers often speak of ‘necessary and sufficient conditions’, or, what I call ‘what’s needed and what’s enough’. The problem is: it’s not easy to do. For i...

Stimulus Hundreds of years ago, there was a thing called the Hundred Years War. It was a struggle between two countries: England and France. The English had land in France that they wanted to keep, and they wanted to take more land, maybe even the whole of France. The French fought to win back the land that the English. Over the hundred ...

Stimulus: Imagine a box. Now imagine emptying the box. The aim is to have nothing in it at all. Task Question: Do you think this would be possible? The methodology of the facilitator is that whenever someone introduces something that is still there you anchor them by saying ‘ok, lets remove that to, have we finally emptied it ...

Stimulus Once upon at time, there was a traveller. She rode to far distant lands in her carriage and had reached the Northern deserts of India. One day she was looking for a place to rest and saw a farm by the side of the road, where a woman was feeding animals. The traveller asked the woman on the farm if she could buy something to eat fr...

Stimulus: Imagine a place called Karmaland where, whenever you do something, the same kind of thing happens to you afterwards. So, if you deliberately push someone over, ten minutes later someone will deliberately push you over; but if you help someone then a short time afterwards you will also be helped. Task questions: Would yo...

Idea: The aim of the session is to try to provide an account of the conditions under which it can be said that we know something. A secondary, and more philosophical, aim of the session is to identify any children who think that providing an account of knowledge is harder than it might at first seem. This session is very improvisatory so w...