WEBINAR

Plato's Cave: Thinking About Care, Caring About Thinking

Date: Wednesday 12 February 2025

Time: 10am-12pm (London, UK) with a ten-minute break

Price: Free

Speakers: Dr Rebekah Howes and Professor Nigel Tubbs

This webinar explores what caring professionals might learn about themselves and their roles from the Greek philosopher Plato and his allegory of ‘the cave’.

In his book Republic Plato shows us how our lives are often influenced by things which appear to be true - the ‘shadows’ - but which, on deeper examination, can be understood to carry or sometimes hide deeper truths and meanings.

This course will take a gentle philosophical journey out of and back into the cave to ask the following questions:

• How often do we really look beyond appearances?
• What sort of questions do we need to ask to see things differently?
• What do our ideas of care take for granted about human beings?
• How important are education and learning to our development?
• How important is the question of truth for our work?
• Is it necessary for us to care about thinking?
• If I’m in the cave, how do I get out?

We rarely get the chance to ask or explore the deeper philosophical questions that are raised by the caring professions. In response to this our webinar creates a space for exploring what the idea of care takes for granted and how we might learn to see some of its values and challenges differently.

Meet the speakers

Dr Rebekah Howes 

Dr Rebekah Howes has 15 years’ experience teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level in the university sector, and publishing and presenting papers internationally.

In 2010 she co-designed and led the first Liberal Arts degree in the UK, leading the revival of Liberal Arts study in the UK. She brings to Think Learning the strong belief that what and how we learn should matter to us as human beings, and she hopes to continue to develop this sense of humanity in her work with course participants.

Professor Nigel Tubbs

Nigel Tubbs was Professor at the University of Winchester for 15 years after having been a school teacher in West Sussex and Brighton the 1980s and early 1990s. He lead two undergraduate programmes, in Education Studies, and more recently in Liberal Arts, which was the first such programme to be reintroduced into English universities for many decades (having begun life in Ancient Greece with Plato and Aristotle).

As a university researcher he wrote nine books, including Socrates On Trial, which was a New Statesman book of the year 2021. He is currently part of a new venture in higher education called Think Learning.