The Philosophy Club

"Philosophy is about reaching clarity of thought, which is achieved by putting complicated ideas into simple terms. It’s when we write that we’re doing the real work of philosophy, turning a loose collection of thoughts into coherent and defensible theories. Therefore, it’s simply not an option to do away with the essay as an assignment in a philosophy course. Moreover, it would be greatly impoverished if the assignment was AI-proofed by becoming a handwritten timed essay. This wouldn’t allow the student the time to do research based on their own ideas, nor would it allow them to draft and redraft — to chisel away at their ideas until these reach their clearest form.

In an attempt to reimagine the essay assignment, I asked my students if they would want to write an essay together, with me.
My thought was that I would take the place of AI. We’d be in a continuous conversation, bouncing ideas off one another, seeing our theory grow sentence by sentence. Students would have to properly engage in every class to understand where the essay was going. And they’d constantly have to defend their own writing, not just to me but to their fellow students. They might still use AI, but I hoped it would be sufficiently inconvenient to do so. At the very least, they’d have to participate in class, communicate and defend their contributions, and collaborate with me and their fellow students to revise their writing…

[Students] told me that before, when they wrote their individual essays, they knew that it wasn’t real: they were pretending to be philosophers for a grade. But this time they felt they were doing actual, important philosophy…

By having my students engage with me the way they might with AI, they learned to write much more efficiently and with less of an opportunity for an actual AI to intervene. On their end, the students actively participated in every class. They were constantly revising their writing and reconfiguring their arguments in conversation with me and their fellow students, and they felt they were doing real philosophy that could have a life beyond the classroom.

On my end, I saw the classroom transformed into a self-organizing collaborative space."

- Tom Kaspers

AI was ruining my college philosophy classes. So I assigned a new kind of essay. I couldn’t give take-home assignments anymore. Handwritten tests in class wouldn’t work either. Somehow, I needed to fill ChatGPT’s shoes.

Connect+Explore is our series of FREE workshops for high school students (Years 7–12) who enjoy good conversations about things that actually matter.
✨ Express yourself
✨ Discover interesting ideas
✨ Connect with others in a relaxed, supportive space

Connect+Explore is based on The Philosophy Club's decade of experience running thought-provoking workshops for youth.

This series is hosted by Fawkner Neighbourhood House and runs across a series of six Monday afternoons, 11 May – 22 June, 3:15pm – 4:45pm. (Note there is no workshop on the 8th June public holiday.)

👉 Registration essential.
Register at: https://events.humanitix.com/connect-explore-term-2-2026
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𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘆𝗼𝘂?
If you would like your high schooler to participate but the timing doesn't work for you, please email [email protected] and we will try to arrange an alternative workshop time that suits the majority of respondents.

"I've encouraged my own kids to follow up on any itch of curiosity." — Debra Oswald

I was trained from childhood to be a stickybeak. My dad’s philosophy was ‘always follow your curious nose’ Debra Oswald’s father taught her to be inquisitive about the world. As an adult she discovered that curiosity can help us endure whatever is happening

I've taken off my Philosophy Club hat and put on my Neighbourhood House one! Fawkner Neighbourhood House (VIC) is calling for volunteers to support school students from migrant and refugee backgrounds at their homework club. Come and work alongside me to give something back to the community and be enriched, in turn, by cross-cultural experiences! Please spread the word — I am really excited about this one and look forward to collaborating with a cool bunch of volunteers! For further details contact [email protected]

Ever wanted to volunteer in your community - now's your chance!
https://buff.ly/NHr6GsJ.

"Generative AI may not be able to reason, but it produces compelling chains of reasoning. I call this “reasoning the noun” as opposed to “reasoning the verb”.... In the past it produced bad reasoning-the-noun, and at present it produces good reasoning-the-noun.

Seeing that, the natural human reaction is to look and try to find the current human endeavors where its chains of reasoning are faulty, and say, aha!, on this beachhead we make our stand.

But what if ... instead of trying to circumscribe uniquely human domains out of a natural defensiveness we start with a simpler question — if ChatGPT can provide good mechanistic reasoning-the-noun ... what does that surplus consume? Not what does that surplus make irrelevant — that’s the wrong end of the stick. What is the surplus, and what does it eat up? ...

What reasoning the noun consumes is reasoning the verb. To evaluate reasoning you need ... to be able to reason ...

It is quite time-consuming to do a Toulmin analysis of a claim. And it’s a tricky business. The core of the method — surfacing unstated assumptions that make the evidence relevant to a claim — is exactly the sort of thing that in the space of a busy day you just aren’t going to find the time to do. ...

It seems to me a much better starting point for thinking about education in the age of AI than gathering up the tasks that AI does not do well, and saying “this is what we’ll teach now, the leftovers of AI.” Because if this guess is right, it’s likely that the stronger AI’s reasoning capabilities in an area, the more in-demand reasoning skill in that area will be."

- Mike Caulfield, A surplus of reasoning-the-noun consumes a scarcity of reasoning-the-verb

Read the full article here:

https://mikecaulfield.substack.com/p/a-surplus-of-reasoning-the-noun-consumes

QUESTIONS AGAINST WAR At Wonder Ponder, the Publisher behind the Visual philosophy for all ages project, we need your help. And it’s a matter of war and peace. We have launched Q...

A beautiful metaphor for scholarly conversation:

"You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before.
"You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer her; another comes to your defense; another supports what you have to say; another disagrees. The discussion, however, is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.”

– Kenneth Burke