Sunday, January 9, 2011

Teaching philosophy with Spider-Man; BBC News, 8/12/10

Katie Connolly, BBC News; Teaching philosophy with Spider-Man:

"Now, philosophy professors are finding superheroes and comic books to be exceptionally useful tools in helping students think about the complex moral and ethical debates that have occupied philosophers for centuries...

"I usually have students read Plato, Aristotle and Hume in introduction to philosophy courses. They often find it interesting, but get scared away by just how hard it is to read the stuff," Mr Bartel told the BBC.

"Comic books can provide really good illustrations of these philosophical ideas without scaring them off."...

For Christopher Robichaud, who teaches ethics and political philosophy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and Tufts University, superhero-based thought experiments can help people grapple with ethical dilemmas in an unsentimental fashion."

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