The Philosophy Café and the Examined Life
Grammar: Inversion
A Level 6 English lesson exploring art.
What's in this lesson
A Level 6 (proficiency) ESL lesson on art, practising inversion. The worksheet has a reading, target vocabulary, a grammar reference with practice and discussion questions.
From the reading: The Philosophy Café and the Examined Life
On a Tuesday evening in Lyon, in a café whose windows have fogged with argument and the breath of people who stayed longer than they meant to, a retired schoolteacher is explaining to a software engineer why Aristotle was wrong. Not since the Enlightenment salon has philosophical debate felt quite so alive, so unguarded, so gloriously unfinished — and yet here it is, between a carafe of wine and someone's abandoned coat, in a city that hosts more than forty such gatherings each month. So energised has the movement become, and so wide has it spread across three continents, that the philosopher Marc Sautet, who launched the first Café Philosophique in Paris in 1992, could scarcely have imagined the institution he was seeding.
Vocabulary
- affective forecasting
- bad faith
- dichotomy of control
- hedonic adaptation
Grammar: Inversion
- Negative adverbial
- Seldom does philosophy announce itself this modestly. — auxiliary before subject after fronted negative
- Literary so/such
- So wide has it spread that Sautet could scarcely have imagined it. — so + adjective triggers inversion
Discussion questions
- Would you rather live a long comfortable life or a shorter examined one?
- Is a philosophy café more valuable than a philosophy lecture?
- Which matters more: reaching a conclusion or asking the right question?
The Philosophy Café and the Examined Life
Grammar: Inversion
What's in this lesson:
Full lesson plan with reading, grammar, vocabulary, and discussion.
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