First Breakout Session
Speed Philosophy -- Students and Faculty
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.
The Privilege Line-Up -- Dr. David W. Concepción
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.
Drawing Your Identity -- Dr. Juli Thorson
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.
Existentialism -- Michael Mares and Owen Miller
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.
What is Religion? -- Matthew R. Hotham
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.