Breakout Sessions

Do you want to have good discussions about a wide variety of philosophical topics? Do you think a philosophical topic sounds interesting and want to learn more? Are you interested in learning other people’s perspectives on your favorite ideas and philosophies? Then Speed Philosophy is for you! Join Ball State students for a series of brief but robust discussions about a wide variety of philosophical topics. Learn from your peers and yourself during this opportunity to learn more about philosophy.

You will begin at the starting line and for every instance of privilege that you have experienced or that apply to you, you will step up. The end result will highlight the privileges in your life that you may or may not be aware of. The discussion afterwards will help you think about what equality of opportunity really means.

In this session, we will use several drawing exercises as a way to explore issues of personal identity. Philosophers usually think linearly with one claim following another. Once we have the claims lined up, we usually begin discussing philosophical views via a critique of one link in that linear chain. We will disrupt this linear approach. Ideas connect in an organic fashion and relationships between ideas can be more complex than a unidirectional line. Drawing provides a way to illustrate these complex relations so that the interconnections and relationships can be seen. From the complexity of these new relationships, new insights can be generated about who and what you are. The goal of the session is not the production of a polished piece of artwork to hang on a wall. Rather, the exercises focus attention on ideas, concepts, and the relations among them, and enable new questions to emerge.

Who am I? What should I do? How can I be true to myself? How free am I? These are some of the questions that existentialists ask. Existentialism focuses on the human experience and making sense of the world. While often construed as negative and hopeless, existentialism is a humanism, as the foremost existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre declares — he insists that people have ultimate responsibility in both their lives and the lives of others and the possibility, therefore, to change the world. This session will teach you a bit about how and why to do that through anecdote and discussion.

If someone asked you to define religion, you might start by listing examples of major world religions. Or you might describe central elements of your own religious tradition. But what if you encountered a community, practice, object, or text “in the wild” and had to determine whether it was religious or not? How would you do so? In this session we will try to answer the question “what is religion, anyway?” through examining popular definitions of religion and applying them to complex and borderline cases like the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. We may not come to a firm definition by the end of the session, but we will gain some insight into how others have tried to answer this question and learn to identify what makes some definitions more useful than others.

Do you want to have good discussions about a wide variety of philosophical topics? Do you think a philosophical topic sounds interesting and want to learn more? Are you interested in learning other people’s perspectives on your favorite ideas and philosophies? Then Speed Philosophy is for you! Join Ball State students for a series of brief but robust discussions about a wide variety of philosophical topics. Learn from your peers and yourself during this opportunity to learn more about philosophy.

In this session you will make decisions about how scarce life-saving resources should be distributed. Students will learn whether their moral intuitions are more like those of Immanuel Kant or those of John Stuart Mill.

While many people today think philosophy involves a lot of sitting around, talking about abstract concepts with little bearing on everyday life, this wasn’t always the case. In ancient Greece, it was widely believed that philosophy helped people live better lives. In fact, many important schools of ancient philosophy believed that good philosophy should be lived as well as talked about. We’ll examine how these ancient schools lived their philosophies and think about how they can help us live our own philosophies today.

Intersectionality is a critique of an additive analysis of oppression, which sees certain people as oppressed by racism & sexism & classism and so on… What is wrong with the additive approach? This discussion will this question and the way the additive approach covers over the experiences of certain groups of people, such as black women. We will look at advertisements and examples from the news to talk about the importance of an intersectional approach.

We know we have obligations to one another as humans—not to do harm to one another unjustifiably, to set aside our own interests in favor of the social good at times. But do we have such obligations to the non-human natural world? When should I set aside my own interests in favor of the good of nature? Does it make sense to say a tree or a river has rights? Do I have obligations to future generations not to destroy the environment? We’ll explore some of the major questions of environmental ethics and philosophy.

In this session we will look at Nietzsche’s short piece, “On the Three Transformations,” which charts the journey on how we become fully and creatively human.

Without giving away too many details, I will tell you three things about this game: 1) each person will be assigned a role in a new society; 2) this society has some issues; and 3) these issues need to be resolved. This game is fully participatory, so be prepared!

Are you interested in starting a philosophy club at your school? Join Ball State’s returning Philosophy Club executive board members to learn how to create and maintain a philosophy club. Find resources for building and leading presentations, researching topics, and facilitating philosophical debate. Additionally, gain helpful tips on keeping a philosophy club interesting, engaging, and enlightening for all members while still keeping everything behind the scenes functioning.

Epistemology, the study of how we know, has changed radically in the last few years. We will discuss these changes and why epistemology is better today than it was just a few years ago.

We can all give examples of people who we think are creeps and things we think are creepy. But, really, what is the feeling of the creeps that we have in response to those things? Is the creeps much different from regular old fear? I think so. We’ll talk about our experiences of creepiness, and I’ll give you some reasons to think it is an ethically significant emotion. SPOILER ALERT: We’ll discuss the 2017 movie Get Out during this session. You are welcome regardless of whether you’ve seen it, but expect the discussion to give away a key plot twist.