Stefano Oliverio

...that is, “Let no-one without knowledge of geometry enter:” the inscription displayed on the entrance to Plato’s Academy reminds us how close the relationships between mathematics1 and philosophy used to be. In this perspective, when we approach the issue of how philosophical inquiry can further maths’ teaching/learning, a sort of archaeological attitude is in order, which delves into the layers of a long history, plumbs the recondite depths of Western thought, and unearths what remains too often concealed either because it is taken for granted or because we have become unable to detect what constitutes the very way in which we think.

In this paper we want to rethink the educational significance of the novel – and particularly of novel-reading – from the perspective of a ‘meta-novelistic’ reading of Don Quixote, often acclaimed as the “first modern novel”. Our point of departure is double: on the one hand, there is the controversial contemporary phenomenon of “de-reading”, and all the educational discussions which it entails; on the other hand, there is the existing tradition of literary education, which, from different angles, has already extensively reflected upon the (moral, epistemological, ontological) relation between novel-reading, education and subjectification, but which also sometimes seems to have exhausted its means for doing so. To problematize this double starting point in a new way, we propose to revisit the ‘origins’ of the novel and novel-reading, at the dawn of modernity. By exploring the differences between the narratives of subjectification represented by the Cartesian cogito and Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which were near-contemporaries, we try to argue for an educational-philosophical rehabilitation of the latter, if not against then at least beyond the former. In a first movement, and in dialogue with novelists Milan Kundera and Carlos Fuentes, we do so by focusing on the novel as a particular form, or ‘configuration’, of knowledge – one that is by nature experimental and pluralist. In a second movement, we link this to Jean Baudrillard’s famous distinction between “simulation” and “illusion”, claiming that novel-reading qua subjectification always involves a Quixotic practice of adventurous, ‘playful’ and public negotiation between reality and its more or less ‘illusory’ alternatives.

Homo videns is today’s man or woman whose knowledge-frames are shaped by the use of modern media. The passive experience of an overwhelmingly image-based media can prevent children from developing a capacity for abstraction--that is, the ability to form general concepts, to make comparisons, and to acknowledge different points of view. What is at stake is the future of democracy as a form of life that rests on rational discussion and argumentative skills. Philosophy for Children offers an effective means to counter this phenomenon. If homo videns is overwhelmed by the immediacy of the medium and narcotized by ‘un-reflection’ like a prisoner in Plato’s cave, children and adolescents who participate in the discourses of Philosophy for Children have the opportunity to experiment with thinking, to have first-hand experience in the co-construction of knowledge, and thereby to become citizens of a real and effective democracy

This paper explores the role that the idea of science plays within Matthew Lipman’s approach to inquiry. On the one hand it seems that Lipman shares a typically modern ‘antagonist-metascientific’ view of philosophy in opposing the scientific undertaking and philosophical inquiry. On the other hand, he models his idea of community of philosophical inquiry on the Peircean-Deweyan theoretical construct of community of inquiry which refers exactly to the scientific undertaking. And – what is still more significant – it is just by capitalizing on the “scientific” origin of the construct that Lipman can revive the Socratic tradition of philosophy as a dialogic practice. But Lipman’s relationship with science is still more complex: he identifies science as a project of “outfoxing and outguessing nature.” By tracing the origin of such metaphors to the Heraclitean dictum “nature loves to hide” and to Francis Bacon’s interpretation of ancient myths, and by contrasting them with the Kuhnian idea of normal science as puzzle-solving, it becomes clear that Lipman recognizes the “thoughtful”—that is, philosophical -- dimension of science, and the need for complex thinking within science itself as a basic dimension of its development. Against the backdrop of such analyses, the paper attempts to point to the possibility of a pedagogy of science in a Lipmanian vein