About the 2025
Reason & Rationality
Convivium Summer Program

We are pleased to introduce the Reason & Rationality 2025 Convivium summer program at Princeton Theological Seminary (June 8-14) and Swarthmore College (July 27 - Aug 2). Each week-long session will bring together students for deep conversations about the biggest ideas in Philosophy, Policy and Economics in a series of informal and convivial salons with an approximately 5:1 student-instructor ratio. Students will live in the college dorms with their instructors. The animating philosophy of Reason & Rationality is that relationship and conversation are the font of the intellectual life. 

This year’s conversation leaders are Philosophy Department graduate and undergraduate students from Princeton University, Oxford University, the University of Michigan, King’s College London and Purdue University.  Students in grades 8 - 12 are invited to apply to the 2025 Convivium. Students who attend both sessions get the full experience, priority in enrollment and tuition discount.

Session 1 (Princeton Theological Seminary June 8 - 15, 2025)

  1. The Value of a Human Life (cost benefit analysis, present value discounting, the significance of future generations)

  2. Utilitarianism and The Veil of Ignorance

  3. Basic Logic, Intellectual Virtues, Properties of Arguments

  4. Moral Realism and Moral Relativism

  5. The Trolley Problem

  6. Supply and Demand 

  7. COVID Lockdowns and Ice Cream Cones (total and marginal utility, opportunity cost) 

  8. Private Property and Prices

  9. Complex Systems, Emergent Properties, and the Mystery of Consciousness

  10. Norms Unlike our Own (primogeniture, bride price, dowries, indissoluble marriage, cousin marriage)

Session 2 (Swarthmore College July 27 - August 2, 2025)

  1. Base Rates and the Base Rate Fallacy

  2. Selection Bias, Social Desirability Bias

  3. Preference Falsification and Self-Deception 

  4. Harry Frankfurt on Bullshit

  5. Bayes’s Rule

  6. Do You Live in a Simulation?

  7. Rationality, Rationalism and Pascal’s Wager

  8. The Conceptual Analysis of “Liberal” and “Conservative”

  9. Science Fiction and Philosophy: Life Extension and Universal Basic Income

  10. The Ethics of Selling Human Organs and Babies

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Dean of Academics 

Peter Bach-y-Rita - Ph.D. MIT Philosophy; JD Stanford; BA Princeton University

2025 Convivium Program Director

Joseph Schmid - Philosophy Ph.D. candidate, Princeton University

2025 Convivium Guest Expert Lecturers

BN - Dept Chair of Philosophy H University

BM - Dept Chair of Philosophy P University

2025 Conversation Leaders 

Rebecca Lowe, Ph.D. in Philosophy from King’s College London

Noah Davis McKay, Philosophy Ph.D. candidate, Purdue University  

Oak Hu, undergraduate student in Philosophy, Oxford University

Cadence James, undergraduate student in Philosophy, Oxford University 

Amos Wollen, undergraduate student in philosophy, Oxford University

James B. Estes, Reason & Rationality Co-Founder

Questions about the Reason & Rationality Vision for Conversation-Based Education may be directed to Dean of Academics Peter Bach-y-Rita at info@reasonandrationality.com