This is a textbook for teachers that demonstrates how philosophical thinking can be used in teaching children.

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 paper proposes a view of time that takes passage to be the most basic temporal notion, instead of the usual A-theoretic and B-theoretic notions, and explores how we should think of a world that exhibits such a genuine temporal passage. It will be argued that an objective passage of time can only be made sense of from an atemporal point of view and only when it is able to constitute a genuine change of objects across time. This requires that (...) passage can flip one fact into a contrary fact, even though neither side of the temporal passage is privileged over the other. We can make sense of this if the world is inherently perspectival. Such an inherently perspectival world is characterized by fragmentalism, a view that has been introduced by Fine in his ‘Tense and Reality’ (2005). Unlike Fine's tense-theoretic fragmentalism though, the proposed view will be a fragmentalist view based in a primitive notion of passage. (shrink)

There is a type of metaphysical picture that surfaces in a range of philosophical discussions, is of intrinsic interest, and yet remains ill-understood. According to this picture, the world contains a range of standpoints relative to which different facts obtain. Any true representation of the world cannot but adopt a particular standpoint. The aim of this paper is to propose a regimentation of a metaphysics that underwrites this picture. Key components are a factive notion of metaphysical relativity, a deflationary notion (...) of adopting standpoints, and two kinds of valid inference, one that allows one to abandon standpoints and one that does not. To better understand how theories formulated in terms of this framework are situated in dialectical space, I sketch a theory in the philosophy of time that admits both temporal and atemporal standpoints. (shrink)

Fragmentalism is the view that reality is not a metaphysically unified place, but fragmented in a certain sense, and constituted by incompatible facts across such fragments. It was introduced by Kit Fine in a discussion of tense realist theories of time. Here I discuss the conceptual foundations of fragmentalism, identify several open questions in Fine’s characterization of the view, and propose an understanding of fragmentalism that addresses these open questions.

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Katherine Hawley.1Bitcoin was invented to serve as a digital currency that demands no trust in financial institutions, such as commercial and central banks. This paper discusses metaphysical aspects of bitcoin, in particular the view that bitcoin is socially constructed, non-concrete, and genuinely exists. If bitcoin is socially constructed, then one may worry that this reintroduces trust in the communities responsible for the social construction. Although we may have to rely on certain communities, (...) I argue that social construction doesn’t imply a demand for trust because the relevant communities don’t take on any relevant commitments. Bitcoin is indeed trust-free. (shrink)

Fragmentalism was first introduced by Kit Fine in his ‘Tense and Reality’. According to fragmentalism, reality is an inherently perspectival place that exhibits a fragmented structure. The current paper defends the fragmentalist interpretation of the special theory of relativity, which Fine briefly considers in his paper. The fragmentalist interpretation makes room for genuine facts regarding absolute simultaneity, duration and length. One might worry that positing such variant properties is a turn for the worse in terms of theoretical virtues because such (...) properties are not involved in physical explanations and hence theoretically redundant. It will be argued that this is not right: if variant properties are indeed instantiated, they will also be involved in straightforward physical explanations and hence not explanatorily redundant. Hofweber and Lange, in their ‘Fine’s Fragmentalist Interpretation of Special Relativity’, object that the fragmentalist interpretation is in tension with the right explanation of the Lorentz transformations. It will be argued that their objection targets an inessential aspect of the fragmentalist framework and fails to raise any serious problem for the fragmentalist interpretation of special relativity. (shrink)

Objects often manifest themselves in incompatible ways across perspectives that are epistemically on a par. The standard response to such cases is to deny that the properties that things appear to have from different perspectives are properties that things really have out there. This type of response seems worrying: too many properties admit of perspectival variance and there are good theoretical reasons to think that such properties are genuinely instantiated. So, we have reason to explore views on which things can (...) have the incompatible properties they appear to have across perspectives. This paper explores the view that things can have incompatible properties if the world is not a metaphysically unified place but is instead fragmented. There is a sensible notion of co-obtainment, on which two facts can each obtain without co-obtaining. Using this notion, we can step back from our embedded perspectives on the world without deeming the contents of those perspectives to be mere appearances. This renders th.. (shrink)

The starting point of this paper is the thought that the phenomenal appearances that accompany mental states are somehow only there, or only real, from the standpoint of the subject of those mental states. The world differs across subjects in terms of which appearances obtain. Not only are subjects standpoints across which the world varies, subjects are standpoints that we can ‘adopt’ in our own theorizing about the world (or stand back from). The picture that is suggested by these claims (...) has an appeal but is at the same time obscure and stands in need of regimentation. This paper explores and motivates a metaphysical account of what it is for subjects to be standpoints, what it is to adopt standpoints in our representations and, most importantly, how these notions might help us better understand the subjective character of conscious mental states. Some well-known observations by Thomas Nagel serve as starting points and the paper concludes by revisiting Nagel’s argument for the inevitable incompleteness of objective accounts of mental states, which will be reframed in terms of the central commitments of the proposed framework. (shrink)

Metaphysical views typically draw some distinction between reality and appearance, endorsing realism about some subject matters and antirealism about others. There are different conceptions of how best to construe antirealist theories. A simple view has it that we are antirealists about a subject matter when we believe that this subject matter fails to obtain. This paper discusses an alternative view, which I will call the fundamentality-based conception of antirealism. We are antirealists in this sense when we think that the relevant (...) matter fails to be constitutive of fundamental reality. The following discussion will not rely on any particular understanding of fundamental reality, covering conceptions based on grounding, naturalness and truthmaking, to name three salient ones. This paper argues that there are serious issues with fundamentality-based metaphysics. It will be argued that: the fundamentality-based approach shapes and restricts our realist and antirealist views in unsatisfying ways, that it is unable to handle the conflicting facts that lie across the envisaged ‘layers’ of the metaphysically structured world, and that the methodological reasons for adopting the fundamentality-based approach fail. The paper will conclude with a diagnosis of the discussed issues, identifying a common source. (shrink)

Critical thinking is in vogue - in colleges and universities as well as in elementary and secondary schools. This fact alone is enough to give us pause: seldom do shifts in academic fashion happen concurrently at all educational levels.

Our aim in this article is to define the difficulties that clinical ethics services encounter when they are asked to demonstrate the value a clinical ethics service (CES) could and should have for an institution and those it serves. The topic emerged out of numerous related presentations at the Un- Conference hosted by the Cleveland Clinic in August 2018 that identified challenges of articulating the value of clinical ethics work for hospital administrators. After a review these talks, it was apparent (...) that the field of clinical ethics may be at a crisis of sorts due to increased pressure to provide explicit measures to healthcare institutions to concretely demonstrate that CESs make a valuable difference in healthcare delivery. In this article, we grapple with how to satisfy the need for demonstrable value in a field in which metrics alone may not capture the scope of clinical ethics practice. We suggest that capturing the value of a CES has been difficult because the benefits of ethics consultation may be overt or attributable to the CES, but are often hidden due to the systems-level and process-oriented nature of clinical ethics work. Part of the difficulty in demonstrating the value of CESs is capturing and conveying all of the ways the integration of a CES throughout an institution positively affects patients, families, visitors, healthcare professionals, administrators, and the institution itself. Our aim is to (1) elucidate the multifaceted value added by a CES, including value that tends to be hidden and (2) suggest how to demonstrate value to others in a way that is not simplistic or reductionistic. (shrink)

Word of the inauguration of a newsletter on the program in Analytical Thinking that is based in the School of Education at Texas Wesleyan College is indeed welcome. Knowing the energy and expertise of the two administrators of the program, Dean Joe Mitchell and Professor Ronald Reed, I have no doubt that the newsletter will be a success, and I shall look forward to receiving every issue.

Reasoning, reading and language arts program designed to help children develop cognitive skills in a sequenced yet cumulative manner.

Composition as identity is the view that a whole is identical to its parts taken collectively. Such a view raises the question of how the same portion of reality can be both one thing and many things. A primitivist view holds that there is no explanation to be had and that we simply need to accept that being one thing and being many things are compatible. One might think that we can do better by resorting to relativization. A relativist view (...) may seem to explain how the same portion of reality can be both one thing and many things on the basis of the assumption that the portion of reality is these ways relative to different ‘concepts’ or ‘counts’. This paper discusses whether relativization truly leads to a satisfactory explanation of how something can be both one thing and many things. The conclusion will be that, when we consider the current accounts of the involved parameters, these relativizations make no explanatory progress. (shrink)

In this first part, Matthew Lipman offers the reader a glimpse at the thought processes that resulted in Philosophy for Children and, in so doing, ...

It is a pleasure to be able to thank the editors of Ethik und Sozialwissenschaften for inviting me to write this paper about the Philosophy for Children program, with which I have been associated since it began at the end of the 1960's.

Content disjunctivism is the view that veridical experience involves contents and objects that differ from those of corresponding hallucinations. On one formulation of this view, we are aware of ordinary material things in our surroundings when we experience veridically, and we are aware of mere appearances when we hallucinate. This paper proposes a way of developing this view and offers some considerations in support. Central to the proposed regimentation will be a distinction between different notions of appearance. We distinguish between (...) the notion of something merely appearing to have a property and the notion of mere appearances, which are types of objects that we can refer to and be aware of. Mere appearances are not sense data or Meinongian non-existent objects but existing objects that do not have the properties that they appear to have. These notions of appearance will be elucidated, in particular by characterizing how they are involved in hallucination and illusion. I argue that the resulting view is supported by how our mental life seems to us when we experience our environment. (shrink)

Disjointism is the view that co-located objects do not share any parts. A human-shaped statue is composed from a torso, head and limbs; the co-located lumpof clay is only composed from chunks of clay. This essay discusses the tenability of this relatively neglected view, focusing on two objections. The first objection is that disjointism implies co-located copies of microphysical particles. I argue that it doesn’t imply this and that there are more plausible disjointist views of tiny parts available. The second (...) objection is that disjointism is at a loss to explain how material objects can be co-located and why the weights of co-located objects don’t add up. The standard pluralist account appeals to the fact that co-located objects stand in mereological relations and this account is not available to the disjointist. I sketch an alternative account that appeals to a notion of ‘material identity’: the statue is taken to be the same matter as the lump of clay. The resort to a new theoretical primitive may seem to invite a quick rejection on grounds of unnecessary theoretical complexity but I argue that an abductive comparison with rival forms of pluralism shows that such a rejection is misguided. (shrink)

The history of the relationship between philosophy and education has been a long and troubled one. In part, this stemmed from the problematic nature of philosophy itself, but this difficulty was compounded by controversy as to the age at which training in philosophy should begin. Although Socrates seemed indifferent to whether he conversed philosophically with young or old, his pupil, Plato, was inclined to restrict philosophy to mature students, on the grounds that it made the younger ones unduly contentious. Since (...) philosophers in those days had the reputation of being ‘friends of wisdom,’ and since being a friend of wisdom seemed to require extensive experience, it came to be taken for granted, generation after generation, that philosophy was not for the young. It has sometimes been made available, on a limited basis, at the secondary school level, but almost never to students in the lower grades. To the suggestion that this prevented children from having access to ideas, theories and abstract concepts, the stock response was that children were mired in the ‘concrete’ level of experience and had no interest in abstractions. To the report that very young children almost invariably greeted opportunities to discuss philosophy with joy and delight, the standard reply was that this proved that the children could not be doing philosophy, since the study of philosophy is a serious and difficult matter. The recent career of philosophy in elementary and secondary education has been a matter of overcoming precisely these objection and misconceptions. Unfortunately, a listing of the advantages to be derived by the young from the study of philosophy—its strengthening of reasoning and judgment, its fostering of concept-formation skills, its clarification of values and ideals—is likely to obscure the intrinsic satisfactions that children derive from their classroom communities of philosophical inquiry. But even here there are signs of change, and a new appreciation of the educational possibilities of philosophy is at last beginning to surface in the schools. (shrink)