About the APO

Mission

Through the APO essay-writing experience and in providing two students the opprtunity to attend the IPO, the APO seeks to provide American high school students with the ability to contribute to the pre-university development of philosophical inquiry, critical, creative, and international thinking.

History

In 2009, Joseph Murphy, a philosophy and ethics teacher at the Dwight-Engelwood School, met with David Schrader, the Execuive Director of the American Philosophical Association, to discuss his plan to run a class on the history of western philosophy taught entirely in Spanish. A year later, Schrader invited Murphy to discuss the latter's experience teaching philosophy in Spanish.

Prior to this, Schrader and William McBride, the Chair of the APA Committee on International Cooperation and President of FISP (2008-2013), had been brainstorming ways for the United States to participiate in the International Philosophy Olympiad. Murphy's class represented the perfect opportunity: Spanish was added on a trial-basis as an official IPO language in 2011, and that same year Murphy took two students from his class to that year's IPO in Vienna, Austria.

For each year since, the APO has served as the national contest to select delegates for the IPO. From 2013 to 2025, the APO was run through this blog, which continues to serve as an archive of APO history.