Philosophy Across the Ages (PAA)

Philosophy Across the Ages (PAA) is a service-learning outreach program that has been connecting University of Maine undergraduate students with local high school students and retirement community members through seminar-style discussions of accessible and exciting philosophical texts since 2009.

Participants come voluntarily, and are united by the desire to discuss questions of philosophy and their relevance to everyday life. Readings often engage with issues arising in participants’ own lives such as those of race, gender, sexual identity, disabilities, and mental and physical health—for example, Franz Fanon’s “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl,” and portions of John Russon’s Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis, and the Elements of Everyday Life and Alva Noë’s Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. While respecting specific interests, PAA balances its reading selections with texts and ideas that participants may otherwise not be inclined or likely to encounter—e.g., philosophical “classics” such as Aristotle’s Physics, René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and John Dewey’s Democracy and Education.

No matter what the particular reading may be, PAA opens up the space for cross-generational discussions centered around the principles that 1) questions of philosophy belong neither to people of a certain age nor to people of a certain profession; and, 2) these questions are most fruitfully discussed in a cosmopolitan context—that is, in a context in which we are challenged to recognize that the diversity of ideas is a reflection of a reality that will forever need to be examined and interpreted anew. Since PAA’s inception, somewhere in the range of 70 high school, 30 undergraduate, and 25 retirement community participants have engaged in approximately 75 two-hour discussions.