“The course is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. By that I mean it really makes you look at yourself and challenges your thinking and it does that it such a way that it does not let you kid yourself or turn your back on thinking that is clearly wrong.”
“It’s taught me that I have a level of choice in what I believe, I have a choice in how much I let the world get to me, and that means you can choose what you will feel … You can choose the content of your thought, you can choose how you react at crucial points.”
“To create a space where you can be critical - kick all the ideas around and see what really stands up. This gives you, moving on from that, a kind of certainty in what you can and can’t call a sensible way of looking at the world. That’s been huge for me, and I think it’s been huge for all of us because there’s a danger in blind faith - it gives you the feeling that you don’t have to worry about anything.”
“I make a lot more effort to be diligent in my reasoning now. I used to think philosophy was a humanity but now I see it as more ‘portable‘ and can be applied in virtually all aspects of your life. This has made me relax more and reflect.”
“I think the course has helped me understand myself more and also pulled me away from some of the incorrect thinking that I was making. I'm more aware of others points of views, which I certainly was not in the past and now I can see the mistakes I was making in the assumptions I was making of others...or really the not-thinking about others views.”
“The cumulative effect has been to make me 'stand back' from my thinking and reassess not only the way I think and see things, but also to step back & think more carefully about what other people say and think.”
“If I hadn’t been doing what I had being doing in prison on the course I don’t know where I’d be. I’ve been real serious about the course, it certainly has made me see the past clearly – and also where I want to go.”