今日は、工学院の英語授業の一環である「哲学」の授業についてご紹介します。

インターナショナルコースでは、英語でPhilosophy（＝哲学）の授業を実施しています。この授業では身近なことから世界的な課題まで、様々な事象に対して討論や議論を重ね思考を深めていきます。他者の多様な視点や考え方を聞き、自分の考えをまとめて発言する中で、語るべき内容を持つことの重要性に生徒たちは気づいていきます。

本日の授業から

実際に生徒は何に思考を巡らせたのでしょうか？授業の様子をレポートします。

Is anything in the world ‘unnatural’?
In this week’s philosophy class, we placed a line on the floor, and four objects on the line; a banana, a wooden spoon, a chocolate bar and a cell phone. I asked: ‘Can you arrange the objects in a line, from the most natural to the least?’

Students discussed which ordering was correct. At least three different ideas emerged. Some said that the correct order was banana, chocolate bar, wooden spoon, cell phone, because bananas can grow without any help from humans, while cell phones are manufactured in factories using parts made from materials mined from the Earth. Others said that the correct order should be banana, wooden spoon, chocolate bar, cell phone, because making a wooden spoon involves less interference from humans than making a chocolate bar (with its extra packaging). A few disagreed and said that all four objects should be placed next to each other – they are all natural because they came from the Earth, and everything that comes from the Earth is natural.
 
The students came up with the following argument
 
1.     Humans are produced by natural processes
2.     So, humans are natural, and everything they make is also natural.
3.     So, every object produced by humans is natural too (banana, spoon, chocolate bar, cell phone)
 
In response, some students said that humans can deliberately change nature. For example, we genetically modify bananas to make them sweeter, and leave some varieties to go extinct. This means that through our conscious behavior, we can change the course of nature, while other animals such as spiders don’t do this. We considered beaver dams as a possible example of animals changing nature, but one student suggested that beavers construct dams from instinct, while humans do it consciously, so these things are not the same. They proposed a distinction between ‘indirectly changing the course of nature’ (like the beaver making a dam) and ‘directly/consciously changing the course of nature’. As a result of this, they suggested that we can think of humans as natural, but this doesn’t mean everything we make is natural.
 
The discussion went on…