The frame of reference of this paper is, university teaching in prisons and the question of this paper is what teaching philosophy there really means. In my experience, it consists of transmitting philosophy as an exercise of thought between the participants of which –teacher and student- occurs an experience of freedom. It is about the paradoxical encounter between these two subjects, who are polarized by unavoidable tensions: political, epistemological, esthetic, existential. If this paradoxic…
Read moreThe frame of reference of this paper is, university teaching in prisons and the question of this paper is what teaching philosophy there really means. In my experience, it consists of transmitting philosophy as an exercise of thought between the participants of which –teacher and student- occurs an experience of freedom. It is about the paradoxical encounter between these two subjects, who are polarized by unavoidable tensions: political, epistemological, esthetic, existential. If this paradoxical dimension of philosophy is not perceived and we take for granted that it can and must be taught, we run the risk of abandoning it. Added to these tensions, there are others which are inherent to contexts of imprisonment, where the public University has been building an inclusive space- concrete end symbolic-within the marginalization of prison confinement. The students “deprived of their freedom” are the ones who declare they feel free when they approach philosophy, while inhabiting prison environment. This paradox confirms the above mentioned: tension is a condition for the possibility of philosophy, because, far from limiting it, it is its own life. The transmission of philosophy always needs an emancipating teacher; but if they teach in prisons, they should be free both from intellectual and moral superiority feelings or attitudes. This requirement – maybe the most difficult- is sine qua non, if we want philosophy to have an emancipating effect within prison confinement.
