David Kennedy

This book may be described as a Festschrift—or more accurately a Gedenkschrift, given that it is a posthumous celebration of Gareth Matthews’ work and career. It consists of a selected anthology of his papers, interspersed with papers by scholars that offer interpretive perspectives on his work. The Matthews papers, which are brilliantly chosen, represent only one dimension of his oeuvre; he was in fact a recognized scholar of ancient and medieval philosophy, particularly Plato, Aristotle and Augustine. The present selection draws from his persistent, oddly related inquiry, pursued over the course of almost 40 years, into the theory and practice of conducting philosophical conversations with children, whether inside or outside the classroom.

This conversation offers a discussion of the meaning, sense and social function of school, both as an institution and as a time-space for the practice of schole . It also discusses the different types of Greek time : Schole is, as aion or childhood, a further emergence, a radicalization of school as an experimental zone of subjectivity and of collectivity. Schole is, as aion or childhood, a further emergence, a radicalization of school as an experimental zone of subjectivity and of collectivity. The source of this radicalization is philosophy, to the extent that the philosophical impulse turns us inward upon ourselves in the interest, not of techniques for the enhancement of productive time, but of an emergent new brain: in the interest of new values, new sensibilities, new capacities, new connections, new centers of meaning, new bodies. Today we are in a global situation—the situation of late capitalism and late empire—in which school turns upon and ruthlessly suppresses schole, which distorts their relation almost beyond recognition. There is a struggle between school as a more efficient, far-reaching vehicle for the technical transformation of the chore curriculum, and schole as utopia. The paper also examines the place of childhood in educational discourse, and some critiques of the practice of community of philosophical inquiry in schools are considered as well as the role of questions and questioning in both philosophy and schooling. Finally, it problematizes the role of philosophy in school and in scholé: if the role of philosophy in schole is an active one, even an activist one, then the role of the child in producing dikaiosyne in school as scholé should be no less active. The conversation ends with some questions: in what way is the philosophical life preferable to the political life? Why are the politics of philosophy worth any more than the politics of the political order?

This paper seeks to reconstruct the role of schooling in a moment of accelerated social, political, economic, geo-political, climatic, indeed planetary crisis. It identifies the school as a potentially prefigurative institution, an evolutionary social frontier, capable of nurturing the democratic social character, a form of sensibility apart from which authentic political democracy is not possible. As theorized by Herbert Marcuse and Richard Hart and Antonio Negri, the “new sensibility” or “multitude” is characterized by greater psychological freedom, individuality, social creativity and self-rule, comprising a “whole of singularities” that “acts in common”. It suggests a human subject with a vital, biological drive for liberation, with a consciousness capable of breaking through the material as well as ideological veil of a society based on hierarchy and domination, and is associated politically with democracy and social-anarchism, or what Murray Bookchin called “communalism”. This paper identifies three main characteristics of an institution informed by this form of modal subjectivity, all of them based on student-teacher dialogue: an emergent, project-based curriculum, whole-school direct democratic governance on all levels of the community, and the regular practice of communal philosophical inquiry, through which we problematize the concepts we live by, in the interest of their ongoing reconstruction.

A key challenge for educational provision in the Republic of Ireland has been the need to develop appropriate approaches to religious education that are effective in terms of meeting the needs and rights of students in a democratic pluralistic society. At the centre of such discussions, although rarely explicitly recognised, is an attempt to grapple with the question of truth in the context of religious education. This paper argues that religious education, in attempting to engage with this evolving context, is challenged in two trajectories: (a) by approaches that operate from the presumption that objective truth exists and (b) by approaches that are sceptical of any claim to objective truth. It will be argued that proposals, such as those offered by active pluralists, to deal with religious truth claims in religious education are limited in terms of their capacity to adequately treat such claims and the demands that these carry for adherents. This paper argues for a hermeneutical treatment of the context for Catholic religious education in the Republic of Ireland, which is considered under the following headings: (1) irruptions from the periphery, (2) the theological matrix, (3) the status of religion, and (4) the position of students and teachers in religious education classes. From this it will be suggested that promoting religious education as a hermeneutic activity allows for a respectful engagement with competing truth claims.

This paper argues that an enclosed hermeneutical circle is evident at the centre of modern religious education as a result of its rootedness in the romantic hermeneutical tradition. It argues that modern religious education carries an implicit text-based hermeneutical orientation. It contends that such a hermeneutical approach is limited in terms of its ability to engage with persons’ encounter with truth in life itself as it unfolds historically. This paper attempts to move beyond an enclosed hermeneutical circle at the centre of modern religious education, as well as the restrictive hermeneutics that it implicitly promotes, by recognising the givenness of the other in encounters with truth. This is achieved by considering the phenomenological and theological project of Jean-Luc Marion. It argues that Marion has much to offer hermeneutical discourse in religious education by way of his embrace of the possibility of a God-beyond-being, his notion of givenness, and his discernment of four hermeneutical moments of givenness. By engaging with, and introducing, these aspects of Marion’s work to hermeneutical discourse in religious education, this paper points to the need for a more dynamic hermeneutic that is open to the givenness of the other in encounters with truth or truth-events.

Ao XIX Congresso foram apresentadas 166 propostas de comunicações, 43 de oficinas e 17 de pôsteres. Das 136 propostas aceitas de comunicações, foram selecionados os 19 textos que compõem o presente Dossier. Mesmo eles tendo sido aprovados por dois pareceristas para o colóquio, passaram por dupla avaliação cega de pares para ser aqui publicados. Assim, integram o Dossier 19 artigos, dos quais 11 em inglês, 5 em castelhano e 3 em português. Dentre eles, o texto vencedor do 2019 ICPIC Prêmio à Excelência em interpretar Filosofia para/com crianças, outorgado pelo Conselho Internacional para a Investigação Filosófica com Crianças, “Intersubjetividade: um olhar sobre a comunidade de investigação filosófica”, de Paula Alexandra Vieira. Todos os trabalhos têm resumos em português, inglês e espanhol. Nos próximos parágrafos apresentaremos uma sinopse dos trabalhos.

This paper traces the changing status of the school as a counter culture in the anthropological and historical literature, in particular from the moment when compulsory mass schooling assumed the function of ideological state apparatus in the post-revolutionary 19th century West. It then focuses attention on what may be called the New School, which could be said to represent an evolved, postmodern embodiment of the social archetype of the school as interruption of the status quo. It emerged in the form of schools initially associated with Romanticism and with socialist libertarian or ‘anarchist’ impulses, and moved, if temporarily, into the educational mainstream in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the left sector of the Progressive Education movement, proliferated in the 1960s and 70s in various school reform movements, and is a constant presence today in the theory and practice of those schools that identify themselves as ‘democratic’. It is based on principles of adult–child dialogue and direct democratic practice. Examples that we have of the New School tend to be characterised by material and activity environments that value variety, emergence, choice, emotional safety, self-initiation and self-organisation; that are multi-sensorial and polysymbolic; and that are organised on the principles associated with mastery learning, social learning theory and play theory—that is, moderate complexity and optimal cognitive arousal as exemplary conditions for learning.

This article examines the current state of foreign language education in Japanese universities as illustrative of the troubling conditions facing the liberal arts in a globalized neoliberal milieu. The utopian ideal in education has always insinuated, at the least, a pedagogy that inspires personal agency, creative investment, challenge to power and social change. This imagining of incalculable futures, however, has been undermined by the seemingly inevitable and confluent forces of a networked world, represented most forcefully by the socioeconomic reductionism of neoliberal globalism. In the context of contemporary Japanese higher education, these forces are joined by Japan’s uniquely ambivalent relationship with the ‘outside’ world, and manifested in the rigid conceptualizations that motivate deeply problematic government and institutional initiatives for the ‘globalization’ of higher education. Within the frame of Bernard Stiegler’s work on transindividuation (ps...

Biesta states at the beginning of his intervention that he will speak “as an educationalist” outside not only of “philosophical work with children” but “outside of philosophy”. What are the implications of these assumptions in terms of “what is philosophy?” and “what is education?” Can we really speak about “philosophical work with children” outside philosophy? What are the consequences of taking this position? From this initial questioning, in this response some other questions are offered to Biesta’s presentation: is philosophical work with children about asking better questions or asking questions better as he states in his presentation? Finally, pfc risks as presented by Biesta are examined: a) being reduce to critical thinking, i.e., “to keep a clear head”; b) even being extended to creative and caring thinking, it could “stay in the head” and “not touch the soul”; c) that through the building of communities of inquiry in the classroom, we establish a kind of artificial setting where “we end up living in an idea about the world rather than the world”. The response ends with a last reference to Biesta’s approach of education in terms of “growing” and existence in terms of a “grown-up way” of being in the world.

This article explores the necessary requirements for effective teacher facilitation of community of philosophical inquiry sessions among children, and suggests that the first and most important prerequisite is the capacity to listen to children, which in turn is based on a critical and reflective interrogation of one’s own philosophy of childhood —the set of beliefs and assumptions about children and childhood which adults tend to project onto real children. It argues that the most effective way to explore these assumptions is in community of philosophical inquiry, where we encounter the same concepts—nature, person, good and evil, innocence, etc.—which underlie more general philosophical inquiry. It then describes the work of the American educator Patricia Carini, who developed the Descriptive Review Process as a phenomenological approach to understanding the children with whom one is in relation, and identifies the Descriptive Review Process as another form of the practice of philosophy of childhood which, together with the regular practice of POC-CPI among teachers, offers us a grounded, integrated methodology for schools dedicated to adult-child dialogue and to school as a site for cultural reconstruction.

This paper offers a genealogy of dialogic education, tracing its origins in Romantic epistemology and corresponding philosophy of childhood, and identifying it as a counterpoint to the purposes and assumptions of universal, compulsory, state-imposed and regulated schooling. Dialogic education has historically worked against the grain of standardized mass education, not only in its view of the nature, capacities and potentialities of children, but in its economic, political and social views, for which childhood is understood as a promissory condition. Dialogic education is oriented to what Dewey called “a future new society of changed purposes and desires,” made possible by an emergent form of social character. It has followed its own developmental trajectory from its origins in Pestalozzi’s Rousseau-inspired innovations, through anarchist theory and practice and the Progressive Education movement, to its current most salient formulation in the Democratic Education movement, whether as an enemy within the gates of standardized education or as expressed in innumerable alternative forms of schooling or unschooling. The paper highlights several key characteristics, gleaned from all those forms, of the dialogic school—identified as intentionality, transitionality, emergence, aesthetic temporality, interdisciplinarity and group governmentality--and argues further that community of philosophical inquiry theory and practice as a form of post-Socratic group dialogue that emerged in the 1970’s, is a pedagogical praxis that offers a grand operational template for dialogic education as a form of schooling.

This article argues that children represent one vanguard of an emergent shift in Western subjectivity, and that adult-child dialogue, especially in the context of schooling, is a key locus for the epistemological change that implies. Following Herbert Marcuse's invocation of a ‘new sensibility’, the author argues that the evolutionary phenomenon of neoteny—the long formative period of human childhood and the pedomorphic character of humans across the life cycle—makes of the adult-collective of school a primary site for the reconstruction of belief. After exploring child-adult dialogue more broadly as a form of dialectical interaction between what Dewey called ‘impulse’ and ‘habit’, three key dimensions of dialogic schooling are identified, all of which are grounded in a fourth: the form of dialogical group discourse called community of philosophical inquiry (CPI), which is based on the problematisation and reconstruction of concepts through critical argumentation. As a discourse-model, CPI grounds practice in all of the dialogic school's emergent curricular spaces, whether science, mathematics, literature, art, or philosophy. Second, it opens a functional space for shared decision-making and collaborative governance, making of school an exemplary model of direct democracy. Finally, CPI as a site for critical interrogation of concepts encountered in the curriculum (e.g. ‘alive’, ‘justice’, ‘system’, ‘biosphere’) and as a site for democratic governance leads naturally to expression in activist projects that model an emergent ‘new reality principle’ through concrete solutions to practical problems on local and global levels

This paper seeks to address the question of schooling for democracy by, first, identifying at least one form of social character, dependent, after Marcuse, on the historical emergence of a “new sensibility.” It then explores one pedagogical thread related to the emergence of this form of subjectivity over the course of the last two centuries in the west, and traces its influence in the educational counter-tradition associated with philosophical anarchism, which is based on principles of dialogue and social reconstruction as opposed to monologue and reproduction. The idea of a dialogical school has been made possible by a historical shift in adult views of child as interlocutor rather than “othered” object of adult formation—a shift that can be observed in an historical process of “closer approaches” between adult and child and a recognition of childhood and adulthood as forms of subjectivity that lie on a synchronous rather than a diachronic lifespan continuum. Finally the author identifies an archetype of “school” understood as a specific type of intentional community—an experimental zone in which participants are allowed and encouraged, through explicitly dialogical practice, to develop the personal and relational habits that make authentic democracy possible—a communal form that gives practical meaning to Dewey’s notion of school as “embryonic society”: a utopian space where natality is recognized as a fundamental cultural force, and where the evolutionary possibilities inherent in neoteny are taken as normative.

At the very least, even though Chinese schools do not look very different from those in the West, China offers an opportunity for Philosophy for Children to question its basis, its methodology, its aims. It seems to be expressing a different cultural voice, and to be disposed to the kind of dialogue we are more used to claiming than practicing. Both Kunming and Shanghai provide, in their own ways, formidable contexts: the deep, strong and disciplined educators of Railway Station School of Kunming and the scholarly, sophisticated and committed members of the Shanghai institute for Research in the Human Sciences seem determined to take Philosophy for Children, not just beyond their own limits as Chinese, but beyond the limits Philosophy for Children has already established for itself in the West. Philosophy for Children in China, then, looks like a wonderful opportunity to think ourselves--what we are as educators engaged in the practice of philosophy--again. An invitation to think ourselves again. Is this not what dialogue and philosophy are about? It’s up to us to accept the invitation.

Childhood & philosophy é uma revista que está esperando por nascer pelo menos desde que Sócrates ocupou um lugar singular na pólis do século v a. C. e fundou uma disciplina. A concepção dessa revista se sustenta, muito mais tarde, no providencial encontro histórico entre a educação da infância e a filosofia. esse encontro, por sua vez, teve que esperar pelas proféticas declarações de Rousseau no Emílio, enviadas qual um manuscrito posto numa garrafa à revolução iminente e também pelo lento desenvolvimento, ao longo dos séculos XIX e XX, de um tipo de adulto realmente capaz de ouvir as crianças, senão de escutá-las. Para isso foi necessária a desconstrução romântica de tal adulto vivamente esclarecido quem, devemos admitir, fez possível a revolução

In this essay David Kennedy argues that children represent one vanguard of an emergent shift in Western subjectivity, and that adult–child dialogue, especially in the context of schooling, is a key locus for the epistemological change that implies. Following Herbert Marcuse's invocation of a “new sensibility,” Kennedy argues that the evolutionary phenomenon of neoteny — the long formative period of human childhood and the paedomorphic character of humans across the life cycle — makes of the adult–child collective of school a primary site for the reconstruction of belief. After exploring child–adult dialogue more broadly as a form of dialectical interaction between what John Dewey called “impulse” and “habit,” Kennedy identifies three key dimensions of dialogic schooling, all of which are grounded in a fourth: the form of dialogical group discourse called community of philosophical inquiry, which is based on the problematization and reconstruction of concepts through critical argumentation. As a discourse model, CPI grounds practice in all of the dialogic school's emergent curricular spaces, whether science or mathematics, whether literature, art, or philosophy. Second, CPI opens a functional space for shared decision making and collaborative governance, making of school an exemplary model of direct democracy. Finally, CPI as a site for the critical interrogation of concepts encountered in the curriculum and as a site for democratic governance leads naturally to expression in activist projects that model an emergent “new reality principle” through concrete solutions to practical problems on local and global levels.

We lead off this issue of Childhood and Philosophy with a collection of testimonies, homages, and brief memoirs offered from around the world in response to the death of the founder of Philosophy for Children, Matthew Lipman on December 26, 2010, at the age of 87. To characterize Lipman as “founder” is completely accurate, but barely evokes the role he played in conceiving, giving birth to, and nurturing this curriculum cum pedagogy that became a movement, and which has taken root in over 40 countries, from Iceland to Nigeria to Taiwan to Chile and everywhere in between. The movement itself is broader than the program, which has in fact experienced multiple transformations in multiple contexts over its half-century of life. In fact, as many of the testimonies below either state outright or imply, the movement is an emancipatory one and thus implicitly political, infused with all the long-suffering hope for our species inspired in us by the fact of natality, and by our own intuitive faith in the transformative power of reason—or as Lipman came to call it, “reasonableness.” For those seized by its educational possibilities, it presents a sudden influx of sunlight and fresh air into an institution long stultified by its own rigid habitus, and promises the reconstruction of schooling in the image of authentic democratic practice that recognizes and honors the unique capacities of children. As Philosophy in the Classroom—Lipman’s first and now classic statement of educational philosophy--puts it, the movement promises a re-orientation of the goal of education from information (or “learning”) to meaning, and inaugurates the dialogue with childhood and children that follows from that. Lipman was not just founder of this movement but creator, inventor, developer, convener, organizer, faithful soldier, ambassador, apologist, polemicist, propagandist, and, finally, undying optimist.

This paper seeks to identify the role of play in the design and function of Socratic dialogue as practiced in community of philosophical inquiry (CPI) in classrooms. It reviews the ideas of some major play theorists from various fields of study and practice—philosophy, cultural anthropology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and education—and identifies the epistemological, ontological, and axiological judgments they share in their analyses of the phenomenon of play. It identifies five psychodynamic dimensions in which the Socratic play of “following the argument where it leads” can be identified: the “play space,” the “time of play,” “the rules of the game,” “the stakes in play,” and “play and power.” Finally, it suggest that there is a historical relationship between the reconstruction of Socratic dialogue in CPI and the cultural reconstruction of “child” in post-modern philosophy, with special attention to Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s notion of “becoming-child” as emblematic of an emergent “post-human” style of subjectivity.