Teaching Philosophy

Volume 40, Issue 4, December 2017

Tracy Bowell, Justine Kingsbury
Pages 395-405

How Can We Get Students to Think Critically about Intransigent Beliefs?

Part of the job of the philosophy teacher, and in particular the critical thinking teacher, is to encourage students to critically examine their own beliefs. There are some beliefs that are difficult to think critically about, even for those who have critical thinking skills and are committed to applying them to their own beliefs. These resistant beliefs are not all of a kind, and so a range of different strategies may be needed to get students to think critically about them. In this paper we suggest some such strategies.