It’s not often you get to meet your heroes but, this week, four leading Philosophers leaped out of the pages of our text books and came to NLCS to give talks and take questions from Sixth Formers.
Six schools came to our Philosophy Conference including one school from Oxford, to hear and debate with the academics. Dr Rebecca Roache from the University of London talked about Philosophy and wellbeing, ONL Sailee Khurjekar gave a fascinating discussion on the Philosophy of obscenity, Professor Angie Hobbs, Chair of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at Sheffield University, gave a lecture on the Philosophy of Uncertainty, and Dr Laura Gow, from Liverpool University, gave a talk on the strange world of Panpsychism. All four of our Philosopher Queens were inspirational and the questions from the floor of a packed Performing Arts Centre were insightful and showed the level of interest and engagement in the subject from our Sixth Formers.
Later in the week, Philosophy Society hosted a talk from New York University’s Dr Sam Parnia, who gave us a preview of his forthcoming documentary on research into “Near Death Experiences” and what they teach us about the relationship between the mind and the body whilst rewriting the medical textbook definition of ‘death.’
Mr Holt’s assembly on ‘Perception’ gave us an insight into the philosophy of optical illusion whilst Philosophy Society’s student-led assembly gave us a whistle-stop tour of philosophers, from Plato to Locke, on their approaches to the relationship between perception and reality.
