学校生活

This term, year 10 Philosophy students are tackling one of life’s biggest questions: What is reality? Working in small groups, students take on the role of philosophers contributing to a fictional journal, Modern Reality Quarterly, for its special issue “Young Voices on Reality.” Their mission is to create and defend their own Reality Manifesto — a theory explaining what is truly real and how we can know it.
Each group is developing original ideas or creative twists on famous philosophers such as Descartes and Kant. They will explore deep questions: Can we trust our senses? Does reality exist independently of our minds? Is the world fixed or constantly changing?
To test their theories, students face classic philosophical challenges including the Dream Problem, the Simulation Scenario, and the False Memory Challenge and will defend their ideas with logic and evidence.
This project not only sharpens students’ critical thinking and communication skills but also reminds us all how philosophy encourages us to question, reason, and wonder about the nature of existence itself.

Below are some of the essay’s students wrote. It is not the whole essay- just parts oof it.

In Response to Common Sense Realism

Our theory is somewhat similar to common sense realism in that it relies on your senses to define what is real and they both share the core idea of not questioning your reality. However, while ‘common sense’ can be used to tell the difference between a reality and a dream in Common Sense Realism, ‘common sense’ is hard to define and so we decided to change the idea slightly. Our theory of reality based on perception is also different from Common Sense Realism as the logic is reversed a little. In common Sense Realism you can trust your senses to detect reality, in our theory, that reality is real BECAUSE you perceive it. These changes make our theory more concrete and set in stone.

Main definitions/fundamental theories
“We think therefore we are” is our core basis to our ideas.

Definition of the term “reality”:
A dimension where our consciousness resides consistently.

The fundamental principles of the world we believe in:

• We are the main characters. Everyone else is still humans, but only exists for your story to continue.
• Before you were born, they created the world for you to live in. After you die, everybody vanishes from reality.
• Everything in the universe that has happened or existed before you existed, was there just to make the foundations of the current reality/world you live in.
• Not-physical experiences like dreams are experienced by us also to shape the foundations of the world we live in.

Answers to common philosophical questions
“How do you prove that everything exists?”:

• You think, therefore you are. Right now, you exist. Based on our principles, if you exist, everything that influenced you in the past, or everything that influences you right now is real, because you are real.