Richard (Ric) Sims

ToK gives the student the opportunity to acquire those intellectual virtues that will stand her in good stead for managing uncertainties in a world where it is increasingly difficult to separate knowledge from the false echoes of social media. Particularly important to counter these worrying trends is a skill-set including evidence-based reasoning, judgment making, and articulating complex arguments clearly without being simplistic. One aim of ToK is to provide an environment in which the student can cultivate this toolkit for knowledge. Another is to foster a sense of wonder at the depth and variety of human knowledge.   Ric has been involved in ToK for three decades as teacher, senior examiner, workshop leader, curriculum designer and he is co-author of one of the main textbooks in in the subject. He has degrees from the universities of Oxford, Warwick, Liverpool and the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague in mathematics and music. He holds a PhD in Philosophy of Mind/Philosophy of cognitive science from the University of Exeter. He has published on minimal cognition and plant cognition, and his current research relates to distributed cognition in social contexts. When he is not teaching or writing, he can be found composing electroacoustic music, being geeky programming synthesizers, or playing keyboards in the jazz-fusion band Some Funk Junk.