M. Carmen Lopez Sáenz

The Philosophy Program for Children initially inspired by Lipman’s work has been successfully applied in different countries. This program defends the necessity to teach children to think philosophically. In order to achieve this goal, it is necessary both that teachers are philosophically educated and that philosophy is included in the curriculum of all schools. The aim of this paper is to show that phenomenology helps toward the success of this task as much as pragmatism, the tradition that inspired Lipman. The interest of Husserl and his followers in Lebenswelt and in knowledge makes pedagogical reflection and practice richer. Phenomenological applications and methodologies are so broad that they give education a critical orientation. The controversy between Merleau-Ponty and Piaget shows the validity of the Philosophy Program for Children. Hermeneutic phenomenology goes deeply into dialogue, an activity essential to the institution of an investigative community in the educational process.

This essay examines how hermeneutic philosophy, particularly Gadamer's, recovers rhetoric, less as the art of speaking well than as a statement of a truth of the sensus communis, that which communicates veracious content through argumentation. This is the sense in which Gadamer acknowledges the ubiquity of rhetoric and hermeneutics as components of linguisticity (Sprachlichkeit). Conceived in the context of non-methodical wisdom and phronesis, Gadamer's rehabilitated rhetoric is concerned with pragmatics and ethics. Rhetoric is no longer viewed as a technique of verbal manipulation and becomes relevant for dialogic communication. Gadamer thus joins the Habermasian criticism of formalized reason that is detached from values. Both of them reject instrumental reason, because it has colonized communicational reason. However, since Gadamer's view of rhetoric has also been criticized by Habermas and Ricoeur their objections cannot be overlooked in a discussion of his hermeneutics. The essay concludes with a brief consideration of the implications of the debate on rhetoric, hermeneutics, and communication for the twenty-first century