Aaron Yarmel

In the latest publication from their series on the founders of the Philosophy for Children (P4C) movement, Maughn Rollins Gregory and Megan Jane Laverty (2022) have offered us an exceptional gateway into the life and work of Gareth B Matthews. Matthews’ work can be divided into three distinct areas of research—philosophy and children’s literature, philosophy for children, and philosophy of childhood—which Gregory and Laverty distribute across the volume’s five parts. Each part includes representative publications by Matthews preceded by commentary and critique from experts in the field. In this review, I will evaluate this work primarily from the perspective of a practitioner in the P4C movement and explain why it is a valuable resource for anyone with such a relationship to the field.

Conflict is a ubiquitous feature of community life, and communities based on inquiry are no exception. Sometimes, conflict escalates into crisis. A crisis may help a community by providing opportunities for its members to recognize and ameliorate their shortcomings, but it may also destroy a community or limit its ability to sustain productive projects. In this discussion, I articulate two orientations towards crisis: crisis-philia (loving crises and seeking them out) and crisis-phobia (fearing crises and seeking to avoid them). I argue, drawing heavily from my experience as a participant in the Summer Seminar of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, that neither orientation is satisfactory. Instead of crisis-philia or crisis-phobia, we ought to get into the habit of inquiring, as a community, about whether our current obstacles to accomplishing our work derive from being constrained by too much (imperfect) structure or from too little stability. When we find it is the former, we ought to seek crises; when we find it is the latter, we ought to avoid crises. After making my case, I offer an example of what it looks look like to implement this conclusion in practice.

When selecting approaches to pursuing social change, activists commonly evaluate the merits of individual approaches without considering the distributions of approaches already in their movements. This is a problem. I argue, from both general considerations about the division of cognitive labor and empirical evidence from sociology, that some distributions of approaches are better for movements than others and that activists can and should change these distributions for the better rather than for the worse.