Normal child and normal adult alike, in other words, are engaged in growing. The difference between them is not the difference between growth and no growth, but between the modes of growth appropriate to different conditions. With respect to the development of powers devoted to coping with specific scientific and economic problems we may say the child should be growing in manhood [sic]. With respect to sympathetic curiosity, unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind, we may say that the adult should (...) be growing in childlikeness. One statement is as true as the other.The quiet revolution that Matthew Lipman inaugurated in educational theory and practice in his Philosophy for Children program has two inseparable .. (shrink)

Community of philosophical inquiry (CPI) is a way of practicing philosophy in a group that is characterized by conversation; that creates its discussion agenda from questions posed by the conversants as a response to some stimulus (whether text or some other media); and that includes discussion of specific philosophers or philosophical traditions, if at all, only in order to develop its own ideas about the concepts under discussion. The epistemological conviction of community of philosophical inquiry is that communal dialogue, facilitated (...) by a philosophically educated person, recapitulates and reconstructs the major elements—and even the positions or claims—of the tradition, in one form or another, through the distributed thinking characteristic of dialogical discourse. The pedagogical locus of control of CPI is the group as a whole, which is understood as potentially self‐regulating through a process of ongoing dialectical transformation. The role of the facilitator is to act, among other things, from the Socratic “position of ignorance” as a bridge between concepts and arguments and as a trigger for conceptual system transformation. (shrink)

Theorizing Praxis investigates the theory/practice relation in philosophy, particularly within the fields of hermeneutics, ethics, and the philosophy of education. In so doing, it uncovers important areas of common ground between hermeneutical and pragmatist philosophy. Paul Fairfield defends a «practice-immanent» method of theorizing, which is indebted to both traditions and aims to explicitly articulate the spontaneously emergent constitutional dynamics of social practices rather than continue the project of transcendental theory construction.

Based on John Dewey's lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932, Art as Experience has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature.

Author note: Matthew Lipman, Professor of Philosophy at Montclair State College and Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, is ...

This study re-examines John Dewey's philosophy of education, and asks how well it stands up today in view of developments in Continental European philosophy.

With mention of Ogden and Richards' The Meaning of Meaning, and drawing on Mailinowski, for an opening example, Dewey argues for the importance of the relationship of interpretation and meaning, to context and and situation of usage or utterance. In this article, Dewey expounds, among other themes, on the the prospect of interpretation of a radically alien language and what this prospect tells us about linguistic meaning.

Late Dewey on democracy and its social and political roles in American society. Republished in John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925-1953, Vol. 14.

Raúl Fornet-Betancourts Artikel hat drei Hauptziele. Zum einen zeigt dieser Beitrag aus lateinamerikanischer Sicht, dass die westliche Zivilisation mehrdeutig ist, da sie zur gleichen Zeit neue Barbarei in unserer Welt erzeugt. Zweitens präsentiert Fornet-Betancourt den interkulturellen Dialog einerseits als Perspektive welche die Globalisierung der westlichen Zivilisation kritisiert, sowie auch als eine Alternative welche helfen kann, die Beziehungen zwischen den Kulturen neu zu ordnen. Drittens macht die Abhandlung auf einige philosophische Voraussetzungen des interkulturellen Dialogs aufmerksam: der Zustand des Menschen als “singuläres (...) Universal”, kritische Reflexion, Freiheit, um nur einige zu nennen.Raúl Fornet-Betancourt’s paper has three main purposes. Firstly, the paper shows from a Latin-American point of view that the Western civilization is ambiguous because at the same time it is generating a new barbarity in our world. Secondly, Fornet-Betancourt presents the intercultural dialogue as a perspective to criticize the globalization of the Western civilization and as an alternative that helps to reorganize the relationship between cultures. Thirdly, the paper intends to point out some philosophical presuppositions of intercultural dialogue: the condition of human being as a "singular universal", critical reflection, freedom, to name but a few. (shrink)

The author's concept of incommensurability is explicated by elaborating the claim that some terms essential to the formulation of older theories defy translation into the language of more recent ones. Defense of this claim rests on the distinction between interpreting a theory in a later language and translating the theory into it. The former is both possible and essential, the latter neither. The interpretation/translation distinction is then applied to Kitcher's critique of incommensurability and Quine's conception of a translation manual, both (...) of which take reference-preservation as the sole semantic criterion of translational adequacy. The paper concludes by enquiring about the additional criteria a successful translation must satisfy. (shrink)

The idea of the classroom as a community of inquiry, and of the community of inquiry as a model for optimal classroom practice, is perhaps one of the great unrealized ideas in Western educational history. We first find it represented in the Socratic dialogues, but it is not realized there, whether becasue of the dominating power of Socrates' intellect, or the scribal distortions which resulted from PLatos's didacticism, or both. More recently, the concept finds powerful theoretical articulation in the epistemology (...) of Peirce, Royce, and Buchler. (shrink)

Those of us who have experienced the joy and terror of the intensive formation of a philosophical community of inquiry over an extended period, understand intuitively that it is a process of development which has certain characteristic structures and patterns. These can be glossed in a number of ways, all of which will be metaphors, if only because any given moment within the life of the COI is an instant of vertiginous freedom.

When we speak about the aim of doing philosophy on the elementary school level with children as transforming classrooms into 'communities of inquiry', we make certain assumptions about nature and personhood and the relationship between the two. We also make certain assumptions about dialogue, truth and knowledge. Further, we make assumptions regarding the ability of children to form such communities that will engender care for one another as persons with rights, a tolerance for each other's views, feelings, imaginings, creations as (...) well as a care for one another's happiness equal to the concern one has for one's own happiness. Lastly, we make assumptions about children's ability to commit themselves to objectivity, impartiality, consistency and reasonableness. The latter has social, moral and political implications. This paper is an attempt to identify and clarify some of these assumptions. (shrink)