Smithsonian X Philosophy

By johnadah

“My randomly assigned powers at the beginning of this course were x-ray vision and time travel. I felt that those two powers combined could open up a large amount of dangerous possibilities, as anyone who possessed them could theoretically go back in time and stop anything from happening, whether it was an actual crime that was committed, or simply seeing a gun in under someone's jacket and going back in time to try to prevent them from buying it, which would be an enormous invasion of privacy and even an infringement upon legal rights. Because of this, my concept for the character is that he works for the police as a detective, but limits his use of time travel strictly to only travelling back in time to observe a crime that has been committed from a distance with the use of his x-ray vision. This allows him to travel back to the present and cooperate with the police department in order to bring justice to those who commit the crime.

By MargauxMaes

We kicked off Power and Responsibility: Doing Philosophy with Superheroes with SmithsonianX and the Harvard Extension School this week. For our first issue, we asked our learners about Identities and Worlds. 

As budding superheroes and philosophy experts, we created our own superhero personas or adopted the mindset of a superhero character of our choice. (‘Superheroes’ can be super villains as well!)

When creating superhero personas, we thought about:

Does your superhero wear a mask/costume?

What is their motivation/reasoning behind this?

Does your superhero have dual identities?

Who knows about your superhero’s identity?

What does your superhero do? For example, do they fight crimes?