In this essay, I demonstrate the value of the Bildungsroman for philosophy of education on the grounds that these narratives raise and explore educational questions. I focus on a short story in the Bildungsroman tradition, Thomas Hardy’s “A Mere Interlude”. This story describes the maturation of its heroine by narrating a series of events that transform her understanding of what it means to lead a human life. I connect her conceptual shift with two paradigms for leading a human life. One (...) stresses the exercise of distinct human capacities like agency and autonomy, whereas the other stresses human vulnerability to fate or moral luck. I conclude by offering important reasons for educators to adopt the later paradigm over the former. (shrink)

Gareth B. Matthews (1929–2011) was a specialist in ancient and medieval philosophy whose conversations with young children led him to discover their penchant for philosophical thinking, which often enriched his own. Those conversations became the impetus for a substantial component of Matthews’ scholarship, from which our book, Gareth B. Matthews, The Child’s Philosopher, features essays spanning the length of his career. Contemporary contributors to the book critically evaluate Matthews’ scholarship in three fields he helped to initiate: philosophy in children’s literature, (...) philosophy for children, and philosophy of childhood. They assess where he broke new ground and identify developments and debates in those fields. In the reviews that follow, Harry Brighouse, David Bakhurst, and Sheron Fraser-Burgess respond to Matthews’ original essays and those of the contemporary scholars. While recognizing Matthews’ significant contribution to advancing philosophy in the lives of children, all three reviewers indicate ways to push his agenda forward. We read Brighouse as calling for engagement with philosophy in media (including television and film) beyond classical and contemporary children’s literature. Bakhurst explicitly calls for further empirical study of children’s philosophical thinking to support more realistic conceptions of childhood and philosophy—including when philosophy might not be appropriate for children. Fraser-Burgess calls for an accounting of the ways that philosophy for children may reinscribe unjust hierarchies of race, gender, and culture, and of the ways it can be used to confront and combat them. (shrink)

In this article we respond to the reviews, which appear in this issue, by Harry Brighouse, David Bakhurst, and Sheron Fraser-Burgess of our edited book Gareth B. Matthews, The Child’s Philosopher (Routledge 2022a). We are grateful for their sympathetic yet critical perspectives, which we take to be the very kind of engagement the philosophy for children movement requires in order to become more integrated with professional philosophical and educational theory and practice. We particularly value this opportunity to dialogue with scholars (...) outside the movement, which has generated the insights we address here. In what follows, we think with our reviewers about what Matthews’ work reveals about areas of promise and of concern in the movement. (shrink)