In this paper I provide an introduction to the special issue on the Philosophical Novel for Children by pointing to a lacuna in the theoretical field of philosophy for/with children, suggesting that the field is in need of more research on the philosophical novel given its status as the curricular centerpiece of Matthew Lipman’s vision of P4/WC. I describe the genesis of the idea for this special issue, emerging as it did first from a series of questions and (...) experiences which I encountered while working with Lipman’s philosophical novels as a P4/WC practitioner, then through a scholarly exploration of Lipman’s model theory of the philosophical novel for children, and culminating in the presentation of several of the papers published here at a special symposium on the philosophical novel for children at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association. I conclude with a preview of the papers in this special issue, highlighting several shared themes and concerns. (shrink)

This article begins by asking if the project to write a philosophical novel is not inherently flawed; it would seem that the novelist must either write an ambiguous text, which would not create a strong enough argument to count as philosophy, or she must write a text with a clear argument, which would not be ambiguous enough to count as good fiction. The only other option available would be to exemplify a preexisting abstract philosophical system in the concrete (...) literary world. To move beyond such an impasse, this article turns to the work of Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir's unique aesthetic theory in “Literature and Metaphysics” envisions philosophy as an integral part of the literary text and sees the novel not as an argument but as something called a “philosophical appeal”. In her first novel, She Came to Stay, such a concept of the philosophical novel allows Beauvoir to make an original contribution to the philosophical tradition—one in which Beauvoir rethinks the problem of solipsism—while still creating a stunning literary work. A study of the theory and the novel together thus provides a solid understanding of what philosophers stand to gain from the philosophical novel. (shrink)

Henry James and the Philosophical Novel breaks fresh ground by examining James's unique position as a philosophical novelist, closely associated with the climate of ideas generated by his brother William. It considers storytelling as a mode of philosophical enquiry, showing how a range of distinguished thinkers have relied on fictional narrative as a technique for formulating and clarifying their ideas; and investigates (with close reference to his novels) the affiliations between James's practice as a novelist and (...) contemporary epistemological, moral, and linguistic concerns. (shrink)

This book offers a unique method for teaching ethics and social/political philosophy by combining primary texts and resource material along with three philosophical novels so that students can apply the abstract principles to real-life situations. A sample syllabus and sample assignments are provided. This second edition contains an additional teacher's manual, guiding instructors in how to effectively put together a course in ethics using fiction. Students often turn-off when confronted with abstract ethical principles, alone. This book allows interaction (...) with philosophical novels that provide real-life situations that mirrors applying normative principles to lived experience. Students will be drawn into this realism and their engagement with the material will be significantly enhanced. This is an innovative textbook for teachers and students of general philosophy, ethics, business ethics, social and political philosophy, as well as students of literature and philosophy. (shrink)

This article begins by asking if the project to write a philosophical novel is not inherently flawed; it would seem that the novelist must either write an ambiguous text, which would not create a strong enough argument to count as philosophy, or she must write a text with a clear argument, which would not be ambiguous enough to count as good fiction. The only other option available would be to exemplify a preexisting abstract philosophical system in the concrete (...) literary world. To move beyond such an impasse, this article turns to the work of Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir's unique aesthetic theory in "Literature and Metaphysics" envisions philosophy as an integral part of the literary text and sees the novel not as an argument but as something called a "philosophical appeal" (Beauvoir 2004b). In her first novel, She Came to Stay, such a concept of the philosophical novel allows Beauvoir to make an original contribution to the philosophical tradition—one in which Beauvoir rethinks the problem of solipsism—while still creating a stunning literary work (Beauvoir 1954). A study of the theory and the novel together thus provides a solid understanding of what philosophers stand to gain from the philosophical novel. (shrink)

My Name is Myshkin is a philosophical novel for children 10 years and older, which explores themes in philosophy of science, environmental philosophy, and philosophy of mythology through dialogue. The story takes place in the context of an adventure tale set in the near future, in which two children find themselves in the deep woods and they stumble upon a seemingly abandoned villa. (Series: Philosophy in Schools / Philosophie in der Schule / Philosophie a l'Ecole - Vol. 17).

This article focuses on the notion of affectivity, which over the last few decades has become an increasingly popular lens through which to study various themes in the humanities and social sciences, notably with respect to labour. The notion of “affective labour” has been deemed to encompass both work that requires emotional investment and work that is intended to produce emotional responses yet explorations of such work, though varied in schope, have generally not widened their breadth to include the field (...) of education, inviting the question: Can educators and their pedagogical outputs be analyzed through the same affective lens used to study other professions? The Philosophy for Children program created by Matthew Lipman and Ann Sharp represents an interesting case study of education as affective labour since it involves not only live educative encounters with groups of children but also virtual ones portrayed through its curriculum of philosophical novels. This article positions the Lipmanian philosophical novel as a form of affective labour both in process and in delivery . Drawing on the ideas of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, it seeks to demonstrate how the philosophical novel captures the liberating potential of affective labour—relational autonomy within a strong community—while avoiding its negative outcomes of exploitation and alienation. In doing so, it strives to articulate what the philosophical novel has already enabled and what it should aim to make possible in its future renditions. The article begins with a brief account of affective labour as an opportunity amidst risk then proceeds to examine the philosophical novel as a writing endeavour that “authors” affect and subsequently “facilitates” affect among children engaged in collaborative dialogue. (shrink)

This scholarly edition is the first extensive English translation of Jacobi's major literary and philosophical classics. A key but somewhat eclipsed figure in the German Enlightenment, Jacobi had an enormous impact on philosophical thought in the later part of the eighteenth century, notably the way Kant was received And The early development of post-Kantian idealism. Jacobi's polemical tract Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn propelled him to notoriety in 1785. This work, As well (...) as David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism, Jacobi to Fichte, And The novel Allwill, Is included in George di Giovanni's translation. In a comprehensive introductory essay di Giovanni situates Jacobi in the historical and philosophical context of his time, and shows how Jacobi's life and work reflect the tensions inherent in the late Enlightenment. (shrink)

This book offers the first full-length study of philosophical dialogue during the English Enlightenment. It explains why important philosophers - Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Berkeley and Hume - and innumerable minor translators, imitators and critics wrote in and about dialogue during the eighteenth century; and why, after Hume, philosophical dialogue either falls out of use or undergoes radical transformation. Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment describes the extended, heavily coded, and often belligerent debate about the nature and proper management (...) of dialogue; and it shows how the writing of philosophical fictions relates to the rise of the novel and the emergence of philosophical aesthetics. Novelists such as Fielding, Sterne, Johnson and Austen are placed in a philosophical context, and philosophers of the empiricist tradition in the context of English literary history. (shrink)

In Indonesia, there has been a religious trend that emphasizes formality and exclusivity. As a result, conflicts among religious communities or groups within a particular religion are often unavoidable. This case certainly requires solutions, including intellectual solutions. This article explores the philosophical messages of the novel, Tuhan Maha Asyik (God is Fun), written by Sujiwo Tejo and MN. Kamba: contribution to their thought is related to religious attitudes; to get the pre-structure that influences their thought. This article is literature-based (...) research with a hermeneutic approach. The main data source is the novel above, while data collection is done through documentation. The data analysis used is the Verstehen technique. The result shows that according to the novel, worshipping God and practicing His teachings should be based on love, doing good to fellow human beings, and not acting in the name of God to judge others; the ideas contribute to educating the mind and attitude of readers to develop inclusivity in religious life; the ideas are built by authors’ educational background, their life, and their religious tradition which ultimately influence their perspective and concept in understanding the issues of divinity and religiosity. This idea is one of the cultural capitals that needs to be internalized in Indonesian society, especially, to strengthen religious moderation and achieve harmonization in diverse lives. (shrink)

Italian priest, essayist, and intellectual of the twentieth century, Ernesto Balducci identified the crucial turning points of the new millennium by advancing original perspectives capable of opening unusual future scenarios. Sensitive to emergences of society (pollution, wars, ecological collapse), he retraces the causes in the more general ?crisis of modernity,? proposing a new paideia and a new model of thought. He theorizes the construction of a novel planetary horizon that presupposes not only the building of new organizational structures, but also (...) the achieving of an authentic ?anthropological mutation? capable of inverting the course of history. While the old ethics were anthropocentric, founded on the supremacy of humankind over the world and nature, the new ethics is planetary, meaning that humankind must no longer be used as the parameter, but instead, the global horizon over which the effects of his or her actions extend. (shrink)

Georg Lukács wrote The Theory of the Novel in 1914-1915, a period that also saw the conception of Rosa Luxemburg's Spartacus Letters, Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Spengler's Decline of the West, and Ernst Bloch's Spirit of Utopia. Like many of Lukács's early essays, it is a radical critique of bourgeois culture and stems from a specific Central European philosophy of life and tradition of dialectical idealism whose originators include Kant, Hegel, Novalis, Marx, Kierkegaard, Simmel, Weber, and Husserl.The (...) Theory of the Novel marks the transition of the Hungarian philosopher from Kant to Hegel and was Lukács's last great work before he turned to Marxism-Leninism. (shrink)

Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre is often interpreted as an ideal textbook summarising the main points of Sartre’s quite technical argumentation in his academic writings; it illustrates his theoretical views on the nature of time, while it presents a philosophical justification of art through the adventures of the novel’s hero, who is none other than the author in disguise. I show that, despite its popularity, this interpretation is incorrect. I provide an alternative reading of the novel that would identify its (...) core themes, in a way that illuminates the reflective distance between the fictional agent and the philosophical narrator. (shrink)

However, the relation of the novels to ancient philosophy remains under-studied. This volume is intended to open up some of the issues involved.

Through discussions of Locke, Behn, Shaftesbury, Hume, and Richardson, this book traces the idea of romance as, in the process of engendering resistance, it comes nonetheless to define the empiricist mind as the reading mind.

Jacobi’s importance in the history of German philosophy has long been recognized. Yet his writings have been little studied in the English-speaking world, mainly because very few of them have been translated. George di Giovanni’s translation and edition of some of Jacobi’s main philosophical writings now fills this serious gap. This is the first major scholarly edition in English of Jacobi’s writings. The quality of the translation and the editing set a high standard for future work. Giovanni’s translations capture (...) the freshness and fluency of the German original, and his scholarly notes leave nothing to be desired in thoroughness and erudition. But it is not only students who will appreciate this volume. The long introduction, and the many notes, will be useful even for specialists. It is among the very best scholarship on Jacobi in any language. (shrink)

This collection, gathering over thirty articles from the Teaching Philosophy journal, describes novel ways to teach philosophical ideas. Ideas range from simple games for teaching abstract concepts to ambitious course designs featuring various media.

Given the obvious differences between telling a story and setting out a philosophical theory or a carefully reasoned argument, the philosophical narrative is, on the face of it, an unlikely genre. It is rendered even more problematic when we come to the philosophical narrative for children, with philosophy and children being, in the eyes of tradition, an equally dubious combination. The philosophical novels of Matthew Lipman and others constitute an existence proof that such a genre (...) is possible, of course, but the mere fact that the attempt has been made does not nullify the claim that the form is disfigured or misbegotten. Indeed, without further examination, who is to say that the philosophical narrative for children is not a mongrel as both philosophy and literature, or that it can be called philosophical only by courtesy? In what follows I remark briefly on what makes writing philosophical and then apply those remarks to the philosophical narrative for children in order to explore both the difficulties and allure of the genre. (shrink)

Could there be genuinely novel colours — that is, visual qualities having a hue that bears a resemblance relation to red, green, yellow, and blue, yet is neither reddish, nor greenish, nor yellowish, nor blueish?1 And if there could be such colours, what would it be like to see them? How would the colours look? In his article,"Epiphenomenal Qualia,"2 Frank Jackson presents a philosophical thought experiment that raises these questions . Jackson asks us to imagine a perceiver named Fred (...) who is like us except that he has the ability to see a hue we cannot see. Jackson's question is: "What is the new colour or colours like?"3 Jackson argues that all the physical information about Fred, including the physiology of his brain and visual system, and his dispositions to behaviour, would not enable us to answer this question. The totality of physical information would still leave out something about Fred's experience, namely, what the extra hue is like from the subjective perspective of Fred. And if at some point we became able to see this extra hue , we would learn something that we did not know as a result of having all the physical information about Fred: We would learn how the extra hue looks and thereby learn just what it was that made Fred's experience different from ours. Jackson calls his argument "the knowledge argument." In his view, the argument is similar to Thomas Nagel's in his article "What is it Like to Be a Bat?,"4 but both its point and ultimate conclusion are different. Nagel argues that facts about what conscious experience is like for some creature are essentially connected to the subjective perspective of the creature. The problem that Nagel poses is, how could such facts be revealed in anything objective and physical about the creature? How could the objective characterization indicate what it is like to be the creature ? The point of Jackson's argument, however, is not that we would not know what it is like to be Fred even if we knew everything physical about him ; it is rather that there is still something we do not know about Fred's experience — a property that it has — even when we have all the physical information about him: We do not know how the extra hue that Fred sees looks to Fred, and so we do not know all that there is to know about how Fred's experience of seeing the extra hue differs from his experience of seeing red, green, yellow, and blue.5 Jackson's conclusion is also stronger than Nagel's. (shrink)

This chapter explores the evidence for the existence of such new colour experiences and what their philosophical ramifications would be. I first define the notion of ‘novel colours’ and discuss why I think that this is the best name for such colours, rather than the numerous other names that they have sometimes been given in the literature. I then introduce the evidence and arguments for thinking that experiences as of novel colours exist, along with objections that people have had (...) to that evidence and to those arguments. To do so, I outline some facts about ordinary, non-novel colours before considering whether experiences as of novel colours, exist. Then I discuss the potentially significant ramifications the existence of novel colour experiences would have for theories of the metaphysics of colour, theories of the nature of colour experience, and for theories of the nature of perception more generally. (shrink)

While many philosophers of science have accorded special evidential significance to tests whose results are "novel facts", there continues to be disagreement over both the definition of novelty and why it should matter. The view of novelty favored by Giere, Lakatos, Worrall and many others is that of use-novelty: An accordance between evidence e and hypothesis h provides a genuine test of h only if e is not used in h's construction. I argue that what lies behind the intuition that (...) novelty matters is the deeper intuition that severe tests matter. I set out a criterion of severity akin to the notion of a test's power in Neyman-Pearson statistics. I argue that tests which are use-novel may fail to be severe, and tests that are severe may fail to be use-novel. I discuss the 1919 eclipse data as a severe test of Einstein's law of gravity. (shrink)

The common view is that no novel IS an argument, though it might be reconstructed as one. This is curious, for we almost always feel the need to reconstruct arguments even when they are uncontroversially given as arguments, as in a philosophical text. We make the points as explicit, orderly, and (often) brief as possible, which is what we do in reconstructing a novel’s argument. The reverse is also true. Given a text that is uncontroversially an explicit, orderly, and (...) brief argument, in order to enhance plausibility, our first instinct is to flesh it out with illustrations and relationships to everyday life. If this process is fictive (e.g., with “thought experiments”) and orderly, it is story-telling. This paper investigates whether there is a principled way of determining a novel’s argument, which should contribute as much to understanding arguments as to understanding novels. (shrink)

This paper is a review of Suarez, M. (ed.) Fictions in Science (Routledge).

The article offers a philosophical rereading of George Orwell’s novel 1984 in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war, in particular after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022. In recent decades, the dystopia of the English writer has become not only a model of literary criticism of totalitarianism but also the subject of constant falsifications and censorship for Russian propagandists. This study aims to clarify the primary philosophical content of Orwell’s novel and its heuristic potency to (...) expose the sociopolitical situation in contemporary Russia. The author of the article turns to biographical descriptions and philosophical interpretations of the novel in the works of leading Western scholars to finally draw reasonable analogies between the dystopian world of 1984 and the contemporary Russian Federation. (shrink)

This dialogue is concerned with the problems raised by the Rushdie affair for Western intellectuals, whose thought on social issues derives either from the Christian or the Western liberal tradition. This has brought to a head the many difficulties which beset a Western European country as it develops into a multicultural one. Since the concern of the dialogue is with a crisis in the thinking of Western intellectuals about free speech, censorship, tolerance, etc., the four participants are university teachers of (...) philosophy in a British university. They are: Ambrose Taylor, a self?styled defender of ?British? and ?Christian? values, Archie Runciman, a progressive Christian or religious eclectic, Freddie Stuart Hill, a committed Mill type liberal and Jenny Spring, whose liberalism is tempered by the belief that the state should take a positive role in promoting certain values. The author should not be identified with any of the speakers. (shrink)