20th May 2022
Writing: Raish Holloway (Year 13)
The Religious Studies Department and its A level students are proud to invite you to read the second volume of The Challoner's Journal of Philosophy.
In April 2021, Year 12 Religious Studies students embarked on an independent research project free from the shackles of specification pages and mark schemes. Questions ranged from the explicitly philosophical to the philosophically explicit, with some delving deeper into the academic portfolios of thinkers like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Soren Kierkegaard whilst another analysed the question that we’ve all asked ourselves when in silent theatres and professional settings: why don’t I just scream or jump out the window?
From these questions stemmed a long and rewarding process of research, reading, more research, writing, realising you don’t understand what your question actually means, re-reading, re-writing, redrafting and re-reading your redraft. Words like determinism, deontological, holophrastic and anarcho-syndical became essential jargon within these numerous projects, but all of them seek, through biography, question or evaluation, to challenge our assumptions and analyse the world around us, which I would argue represents the heart of the subject.
I hope that those who read this journal are inspired to inquire further into the nature of free will, faith, religion and language, or any other topics that spark something within them. If Shrӧdinger’s cat is dead in this case, it wasn’t curiosity inside the box.
Of course, it goes without saying that none of this would have been possible without the tireless effort and imagination of Mr McIntosh. As good a story it would be that this was assembled solely through the innovation and grit of an ambitious sixth form committee, that belief is neither justified nor true. Mr Mac put this everything together and was always willing to help throughout the writing and redrafting process - my cohort and I cannot thank him enough.
