What use is knowledge if there is no understanding? (Stobaeus)

This website is intended to assist us -student and teacher- in our journey through this challenging course. I encourage you to visit it often as it will contain not only your assignments and readings but also resources that you may use in your journals, essays and presentations.

There are many ways to define what TOK is. Simply put it is a course intended to develop critical thinking skills. It does this by helping you generate questions that facilitate an evaluation of the knowledge that you acquire in your other courses. The primary questions are: HOW DO I KNOW? What can I know and what knowledge is considered to be reliable? Inevitably however, these questions led to many other questions such as the nature of truth. In fact one of the central maxims for this class is that developing 'good questions' is far better that thinking that you have the answers.

Philosophical discussions habitually make men happy and joyful not frowning and sad. (de Montaigne)

The TOK course then is a introductory philosophy course which focuses its attention in an area known as epistemology (theory of knowedge). Many of the ideas and theories discussed in this course will be valuable to you in the university context (and life!) regardless of what courses you take. This is because as an adult it is important that you be more aware of yourself as a learner (how you learn and what motivates you) AND more capable of evaluating the underlying values, beliefs and theories that your community, society, university and culture directly or indirectly expose you to.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old questions from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.(Albert Einstein)

In this course you are finally free to question the knowledge that has been passed on to you by your family, school and teachers for the past 10 years. For most students this can be an exciting and\or disillusioining experience. It is not uncommon to feel a little depressed (or overwhelmed) from time to time. Take heart! With patience it is likely that you will be glad that you opened yourself to such a process as it will likely develop in you new and useful perspectives, as well as a revised hope in your own contributions to the world.

"Know Thyself" (Thales)

In the left hand column you are able to link to the different units of study that compose this course and to your most current readings and homework assignments. Please refer to DP homework Calender for deadlines.

Godspeed,

Mr Leland