DAVID K KENNEDY | Montclair State University (original) (raw)

BOOKS by DAVID K KENNEDY

The Well of Being: Childhood, Subjectivity, and Education, 2006

This wide-ranging work undertakes a philosophically grounded analysis of the history of childhood... more This wide-ranging work undertakes a philosophically grounded analysis of the history of childhood, the history of adulthood, and their interrelationship. Using themes and perspectives from the history of childhood, mythology, psychoanalysis, art, literature, philosophy, and education, the book locates the experience of childhood across all stages of the human life cycle, and thereby weighs its transformative potential for human culture. It offers a nuanced approach to child study that raises issues about how adults see children and how children see the world which could lead to a qualitatively different system of teacher preparation--a system that views the child as participant rather than objects in the structures and processes of social reproduction.

DREAMERS, 2018

Dreamers is a philosophical adventure novel for ages 12 and beyond, told through the eyes of four... more Dreamers is a philosophical adventure novel for ages 12 and beyond, told through the eyes of four pre-adolescent children of varying ethnic and racial backgrounds living in a small town in the American Southwest, who embark together on a school inquiry project centered on the phenomenon of dreaming. Not only do they record and share their dreams with each other, they inquire together into the role and status of dreaming in cultures past and present, the interpretation of dreams, the scientific analysis of dreaming, and the role of dreams in mythology and religion. They conduct this inquiry in the context of a series of extended sojourns into the wilderness mountain range that rises from directly behind their school, where they meet and become involved with Ora, a deaf runaway Hopi girl their age, whose camp they visit, and whose connection with the natural and animal world approaches the mythological. The drama of her fugitive existence unfolds amid a rising tide of right-wing extremism in local and national politics, marked by the existence of an armed camp of white nationalists also hidden away in the same mountain range. The events of the novel are interspersed with discussions among the four friends revolving, not just around the metaphysical terrain of their own dreams, but around concepts in philosophy of nature, particularly whether all of nature can be considered alive, and if so in what way; as well as issues of awareness and subjectivity—whether for example plants can be said to “feel” and to communicate, and if so how. The ideas they broach in their communal dialogues evoke the perennial re-articulation of vitalism, hylozoism and panpsychism in the philosophical tradition, and the queering of the distinction between the organic and the inorganic, the human and the non-human implicit in a post-human, relational ontology.

A Comunidade da Infancia, 2020

A collection of papers from over the past 20+ years, translated into Portuguese.

This study is an inquiry into the nature and significance of the lived experience of the young c... more This study is an inquiry into the nature and significance of the lived experience of the young child, and into the relevance of the results of that inquiry to adult epistemology. As such, it may be described as an assay at an onto-epistemological grounding of a philosophy of childhood. The study argues, first, that current notions of the young child and its development are culturally and historically conditioned. In a brief analysis of the historical origins of these notions, it singles out one image—that of "holy childhood"—as an enduring one in Western thought, and shows how it was given its particularly modern form in classical Romanticism. The Romantics viewed the young child as possessing an "intuitive reason,” a pre-predicative knowledge of things that "arises when we possess ourselves as one with the whole." The study then undertakes a phenomenological analysis of the young child’s perceptual and noetic modalities, and argues that they do, indeed, point to an epistemological style that not only differs qualitatively from the adult's, but whose closest parallel in adult experience is the aesthetic and the religious. In fact the young child exemplifies these forms of experience , especially in p1ay, where he grasps the universal in the concrete in the experience of the symbol, and exists the unity of knower and known which is the ontological substrate of intentional consciousness in general. The fact that the young child’s developmental direction is pointed away from this subject-object unity and towards modes of abstraction and typification does not necessarily identify it is a lower form of experience. In fact the study argues that, not only is this ontological substrate present as a "nucleus of childhood" in the adult, but that, in the West anyway, it is present as a developmental ideal in adults, a spiritual goal: i.e., the recovery, or re-appropriation on a higher level, of the form of early childhood experience. Finally, the study draws some conclusions and suggests some implications for education, where pedagogical theory and strategy are invariably the practical outworking of an explicit or implicit philosophy of childhood.

Although philosophy of childhood has always played some part in philosophical discourse, its emer... more Although philosophy of childhood has always played some part in philosophical discourse, its emergence as a field of postmodern theory follows the rise, in the late nineteenth century, of psychoanalysis, for which childhood is a key signifier. Then in the mid-twentieth century Philipe Aries’s seminal Centuries of Childhood introduced the master-concept of childhood as a social and cultural invention, thereby weakening the strong grip of biological metaphors on imagining childhood. Today, while philosophy of childhood per se is a relatively boundaryless field of inquiry, it is one that has clear distinctions from history, anthropology, sociology, and even psychology of childhood. This volume of essays, which represents the work of a diverse, international set of scholars, explores the shapes and boundaries of the emergent field, and the possibilities for mediating encounters between its multiple sectors, including history of philosophy, philosophy of education, pedagogy, literature and film, psychoanalysis, family studies, developmental theory, ethics, history of subjectivity, history of culture, and evolutionary theory.

FORWARD by Maughn Gregory CHAPTER 1: Reconstructing Childhood CHAPTER 2: Schooling, Neoteny, Et... more FORWARD by Maughn Gregory
CHAPTER 1: Reconstructing Childhood
CHAPTER 2: Schooling, Neoteny, Ethical Reconstruction, and the Child as Privileged Stranger
CHAPTER 3: Philosophy for Children and the Reconstruction of Philosophy
CHAPTER 4: Why Philosophy for Children Now?
CHAPTER 5: Communal Philosophical Dialogue and the Intersubject
CHAPTER 6: Thinking for Oneself and with Others
CHAPTER 7: Young Children's Moves: Emergent Community of Philosophical Inquiry in Early Childhood Discourse
CHAPTER 8: The Role of a Facilitator in a Community of Philosophical Inquiry
CHAPTER 9: Forming Communities of Philosophical Inquiry in Early Childhood Classrooms
CHAPTER 10: Using Peter Rabbit as a Philosophical Text with Young Children
CHAPTER 11: The Five Communities
REFERENCES
INDICES

LIT Verlag, 2013

A philosophical novel for children 10 and older. A fantasy adventure plot line interweaving theme... more A philosophical novel for children 10 and older. A fantasy adventure plot line interweaving themes of ecology, mythology, psychology and spirituality, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion and epistemology.

CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF CHILDHOOD FROM RENAISSANCE TO POSTMODERNITY: A PHILOSOPHY OF CHILDHOOD, Jan 2006

FORWARD: Gareth B. Matthews INTRODUCTION: Signifying Children CHAPTER 1: The Roots of Child St... more FORWARD: Gareth B. Matthews
INTRODUCTION: Signifying Children
CHAPTER 1: The Roots of Child Study: Philosophy, History, and Religion
CHAPTER 2: Child and Fool in the Western Wisdom Tradition
CHAPTER 3: Fools, Young Children, Animism, and the Scientific World Picture
CHAPTER 4: Subversive Innocence
CHAPTER 5: The Child and Post-Modern Subjectivity
CHAPTER 6: Parent, Child, Alterity, Dialogue
CHAPTER 7: Young Children's Discourse and the Origins of the World: The Transformation into Text
CHAPTER 8: What Some Second Graders Say About Conflict

PHILOSOPHY OF CHILDHOOD by DAVID K KENNEDY

Psychological Perspectives,, 2020

Fools and children-particularly infants and young children-proliferate in the wisdom traditions o... more Fools and children-particularly infants and young children-proliferate in the wisdom traditions of the world. Both are outsiders to and subversive of the positive, adult male knowledge tradition. King Lear's Fool, for example, turns out to be the only adult in whom (because he is a "child"), an old, failing king at the mercy of his enemies can find any wisdom. It is the fool who presides over the old king's rebirth and his reassumption of childhood. As they are presented in Western wisdom discourse, child and fool stand for a crisis in human understanding of self in its relation to whole, or cosmos. Historically, this crisis originated in the Greek and Hellenistic world, where both the Near Eastern wisdom-as-technical-knowledge tradition, which had one culmination in the sophists, and its close relative, the even older Egyptian wisdom-as-harmony-with-cosmos tradition which culminated in Stoicism, fell to the radical Socratic aporia. This paper seeks to identify the psychological and epistemological moment at which child and fool become powerful, if enigmatic, signs of the hidden wisdom for the Western tradition, and significant symbols for the mythic structure of Western self-understanding.

Weber, B. & Kohan W. (Eds).Thinking, Childhood, and Time: Contemporary Perspectives on the Politics of Education. Lanham MD: Lexington Books., 2020

What do children have to teach adults? I would like to rescue the often trivialized and clichéd t... more What do children have to teach adults? I would like to rescue the often trivialized and clichéd trope of child as "unconscious master" and prophet of a new humanity. This mastery is a virtual one: it is never actualized, although it is present in what we call infantia, which signifies more than biological or even psychological infancy, but rather a form of life distinct from normative adulthood. The form of life of infantia is always a virtuality, a becoming, but it is no less real for that. In what follows, I want to explore the lived temporal experience of embodiment, in the interest of finding that transitional zone between the virtual and the actual that is the space of becoming other, and which, paradoxically, is also the space of self-actualization, or singularity. Is this the space of mastery? If so it is a negative ideal, in that we typically associate mastery with seizing, controlling, determining, whereas this is a letting go, even a forgetting.

The Paideia Archive: Twentieth Century World Congress of Philosophy 18, 1998: 12-19. , 1998

The Western onto-theological tradition has long been preoccupied with two symbolizations of child... more The Western onto-theological tradition has long been preoccupied with two symbolizations of childhood. One conceives of it as an original unity of being and knowing, an exemplar of completed identity. The other conceives of childhood as deficit and danger, an exemplar of the untamed appetite and the uncontrolled will. In the economy of Plato and Aristotle's tripartite self, the child is ontogenetically out of balance. She is incapable of bringing the three parts of the self into a right hierarchal relation based on the domination of reason. In other words, attaining adulthood means eradicating the child. Freud's reformulation of the Platonic community of self combines the two symbolizations. His model creates an opening for shifting power relations between the elements of the self. He opens the way toward what Kristeva calls the "subject-in-process," a pluralism of relationships rather than an organization constituted by exclusions and hierarchies. After Freud, the child comes to stand for the inexpugnable demands of desire. Through dialogue with this child, the postmodern adult undergoes the dismantling of the notion of subjectivity based on domination, and moves toward the continuous reconstruction of the subject-in-process.

Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 1998

This article explores the necessary requirements for effective teacher facilitation of community ... more 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 (POC)—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 (CPI), 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.

The (re)construction of childhood which began in the early modern period in the West had as its p... more The (re)construction of childhood which began in the early modern period in the West had as its primary movement a reformulation of the adult-child relation as one between very different beings. This separation, which resulted in the isolation of children from the everyday world of adults in schools and the nuclear family, is interpreted as a necessary hermeneutical moment in the adult-child relation, in which the realization of psychological difference represented a dialectical prelude to the subsequent rapprochement and dialogue which deMause has characterized as the "empathic child-rearing mode."

This paper offers an approach to child study that moves beyond the traditional modern domains of ... more This paper offers an approach to child study that moves beyond the traditional modern domains of medicine, education and the social sciences, to explore the representation and symbolization of the child in philosophy, social and cultural history, myth and spirituality, art, literature, and psychoanalysis. It considers childhood as a cultural and historical construction, and traces the ways in which characterizations of children function symbolically as carriers of deep assumptions about human nature and its potential variability and changeability, about the construction of human subjectivity, about the ultimate meaning of the human life cycle, and about human forms of knowledge. The child as limit condition—as representing for adults the boundaries of the human—that is “nature,” animality, madness, the “primitive,” the divine—is re-evoked continually in modern and postmodern symbolizations, and then tension between reason and nature or instinct, or Enlightenment and Romance, is never far from their surface. Finally, the extent to which the construction of “child” also implies a construction of “adult” is explored in the context of the history of culture and of child rearing, particularly in the rise of the modern middle-class European adult personality, which defined itself on the basis of its distance from childhood—both the child before it and the child within. An ideal of adult maturity which includes rather than excludes childhood is capable of transforming our notions of optimal child rearing and education.

Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 1988

Contemporary Western views of the child and of childhood call for a historical inquiry into the o... more Contemporary Western views of the child and of childhood call for a historical inquiry into the ontological and epistemological pre-understandings from which these views have arisen. From the ancient mythological motif of the divine child to the perspectives of Freud and Piaget, this study traces the philosophical images of the young child in Western thought. Given special attention is the image of “holy childhood,” which views the young
child as possessed of a psycho-spiritual unity that is often translated into a goal of adult development. This notion of the young child as exemplar for adults was carried into the secularized West of the Enlightenment by the latter’s mirror image, the Romantic Movement. Although Enlightenment thinking tends to dominate the modern world view, both traditions still live in tension in contemporary images of the young child.

For the Western adult, separated from childhood by the cultural and psychological "coming of age"... more For the Western adult, separated from childhood by the cultural and psychological "coming of age" of modernism, childhood is a once-familiar text become strange, which can only be reapropriated through dialogue, both with real children and with the "child within." In the Western iconography of self, childhood has come to represent an end point, a spiritual goal of unity with self and world, a reappropriation of nature and the unconscious of which the experience of childhood itself is not so much exemplary as prophetic. The reappropriation of childhood is thus a dialectical one, of which the journey into alienation represented by adulthood is a necessary moment. Thus childhood occupies a central place in the Western mythology of self, which is construed as a voyage out of unity into multiplicity, and toward a unity painfully regained on a higher level. The implicit telos of this historical myth is the end of history, for it is repression, division, and self-alienation which generate historical time, and the utopia of a recovered childhood, in recovering the primary narcissism of the childhood experience, passes beyond repression to the "heaven" of instinctual liberation.

On the influence of children's art on modern art. On the child as cultural psychopomp.

The Well of Being: Childhood, Subjectivity, and Education, 2006

DREAMERS, 2018

A Comunidade da Infancia, 2020

A collection of papers from over the past 20+ years, translated into Portuguese.

LIT Verlag, 2013

CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF CHILDHOOD FROM RENAISSANCE TO POSTMODERNITY: A PHILOSOPHY OF CHILDHOOD, Jan 2006

Psychological Perspectives,, 2020

Weber, B. & Kohan W. (Eds).Thinking, Childhood, and Time: Contemporary Perspectives on the Politics of Education. Lanham MD: Lexington Books., 2020

The Paideia Archive: Twentieth Century World Congress of Philosophy 18, 1998: 12-19. , 1998

Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 1998

Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 1988

On the influence of children's art on modern art. On the child as cultural psychopomp.

The Western subject defines itself in great part according to the relations between reason and de... more The Western subject defines itself in great part according to the relations between reason and desire. Plato’s tripartite soul, the first statement of this relation that has come down to us, stipulates that reason, the smallest of the three parts, must rule emotion and appetite. This normative self-structure, which dominates the Western patriarchal tradition, must exclude the Other in the form of child, woman, “native,” and “slave”—any form of subjectivity in which body and feeling interplay in a different relation with reason. This structure began to unravel in the 19th and 20th centuries, along with the understanding of reason which holds it in place. One of the involuntary prophets of this long transitional moment—along with women, people of color, the artist, the mad, and the aboriginal--is the child. Childhood as a psychological and an epistemological condition assumed iconic significance among the Romantics, for whom the child began to stand in, with the artist, as prophet of a new subjective economy—an economy in which Plato’s three dimensions entered a crisis of interpretation. Enlightenment Reason had already shown its dark underside in the excesses of the French Revolution and the rise of hyper-rationalized state bureaucracies which followed reinforced the sense, growing throughout the 19th century, that it hides an irrational core. Nietzsche, Dostoievsky and Freud began charting dimensions of the psyche which progressively deconstructed Plato’s linear hierarchy, and lead to an ideal of subjectivity as a subject-in-process, undergoing a continual reconstruction guided by dialogue rather than domination. The implications of a form of adult subjectivity informed by child subjectivity apply, not just to superego formation, or to social, political and economic relations, but to a model of education which allows for the reinscription of the emergent self in culture and society—i.e., a form of schooling devoted, not to reproduction but to transformation.

"The adult-child situation is paradigmatic of alterity, both psychologically and ethically. For ... more "The adult-child situation is paradigmatic of alterity, both psychologically and ethically. For the child, it is literally the first relationship with the other. For the parent, it is also a first relationship: the first time one has been on the other side, across from one's childhood. Facing my child . . . ."

Both the historical Fool and the young child are marginal to the adult world-picture. When with ... more Both the historical Fool and the young child are marginal to the adult world-picture. When with the rise of modernism the West switched from the oral/aural, panvital cosmos of the ancient and medieval world to the silent, visual cosmos of literacy, the young child was left behind, in that all the young child's ontological and epistemological convictions--animism, finalism, artificialism--are on the side of the ancients. In the panmechanistic cosmos of the moderns, the young child has become a fool, but also prophet of a world-view that is moving dialectically beyond monistic materialism. The very fruits of the scientific world-picture--advanced communications technology--in so improving cross-cultural intervisibility, have begun to expose world-pictures to each other in an unprecedented way, leading to a sort of hybridization which promises the emergence of new forms. Concurrently, researchers at the frontiers of materialistic monism--physicists--have begun to encounter paradoxes and conundrums in the behavior of matter which cast doubt on the ontological reduction of nature which led them to that frontier in the first place. The young child is both a remainder of the turn to and a perennial forerunner of the dialectical turn away from the ontological commitments of materialistic monism in the West, and the preparatio for the return in some new form of the unity sundered by Cartesianism.

In in Anja Muller, Ed. (2013). Childhood in the English Renaissance, 145-153. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2013

A discussion of "childhood" as signifier in post-modernity, which draws on the work of Deleuze an... more A discussion of "childhood" as signifier in post-modernity, which draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, Marcuse, and the Latin American philosopher of childhood, Walter Kohan.

The Western onto-theological tradition has long been preoccupied with two symbolizations of child... more The Western onto-theological tradition has long been preoccupied with two symbolizations of childhood--as original unity of being and knowing, exemplar of completed identity; and as deficit and danger, exemplar of the untamed appetite and the uncontrolled will. In the economy of Plato's and Aristotle's tripartite self, the child is ontogenetically out of balance. She is incapable of bringing the three parts of the self into a proper hierarchical relation based on the domination of reason. Attaining adulthood means eradicating the child. Freud's reformulation of the Platonic community of self combines the two symbolizations. His model creates an opening for shifting power relations between the elements of the self--for intrigue, transgression, dialogue. He opens the way towards what Kristeva calls the "subject-in-process," a pluralism of relationships rather than an organization constituted by exclusions and hierarchies. After Freud, the child comes to stand for the inexpugnable demands of desire, the marginalized "other" within. It is through dialogue with this child that the post-modern adult undergoes the dismantling of a notion of subjectivity based on domination, and the continuous reconstruction of the subject-in-process. In the realm of education, the new model of subjectivity leads to curriculum and pedagogy based on dialogue, and results in a greater rather than a lesser attribution of reason to the child.

Like the fool for the king, the young child represents for the adult original human nature in al... more Like the fool for the king, the young child represents for the adult original human nature in all its ambiguity and ambivalence. The child's nature, like the fool's, is both fallen and innocent, amoral and beyond morality--and what is even more confusing, alternately one or the other. The child's unsocialized presence reveals and exposes the imperfections of the socialized world of adult artifice and hypocrisy. The child's very simplicity seems perverse by reason of the corruption of the adults who so judge him or her.The child is a question put to the adult world, a pretext for a radical re-evaluation of the question of what it means to be human. Like the fool's babble, the child's very being is presented to us as a riddle, an enigma. In learning the language and the moves of philosophy, we render, if only through a sort of displacement, the inarticulate discourse of the fool and the child into adult speech. Philosophy itself does not speak the "prelapsarian tongue," but it is propedeutic to it, in that it has a way of breaking the frames of the adult common sense world, of casting that world into doubt, on the assumption that in so doing, some deeper or better knowledge of the world will emerge. And that better, deeper knowledge is, at least in some part, the knowledge of the child and of the fool.

Childhood Philosophy, Jan 3, 2012

It is difficult to find just one place to look for children and childhood in the American philoso... more It is difficult to find just one place to look for children and childhood in the American philosopher John Dewey's work. This is not because he uses the terms so often, but because the concept of childhood pervades his opus in and through another set of terms-development, growth, experience, plasticity, habit, impulse, and education. In Dewey's language, none of these terms mean quite what they mean in other thinkers' language, and especially not in the language of the human development theorists of the early twentieth century and after, who based their thinking on a monological, unidirectional developmental trajectory that could be applied at all levels of the evolutionary continuum. Dewey is an interactionist through and through, and thus all his terms should be understood as dialectical. He does not invoke the concept "child" without invoking the concept "adult," nor does he describe anything that does not have a normative dimension, which by definition belies "pure" description. His is a language of possibility, and the limits of human possibility are incalculable. This is why the concept of childhood is so important in his work. In this text we present selections from two works, the first emerging at the sickening epicenter of the Great War, in 1916-a war in which youth was sacrificed to what he calls adult "infantilisms" on a historically unprecedented scale, and a war that, arguably, effectively suppressed the educational possibilities his work represents for the rest of the century. Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan) is his magnum opus on education, and characteristically both garrulous and brilliantly pointed, maddeningly oblique and trenchantly critical, painfully dull and fitfully enthralling, explicitly conservative and implicitly radical. The next selections are from Human Nature and Conduct (Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press), published in 1922, when the orgiastic deathfeast of the tyrants, the politicians, and their hosts of blind acolytes was (temporarily) over.

“A philosopher is trying to write a book about the difference between persons and animals, and it... more “A philosopher is trying to write a book about the
difference between persons and animals, and it’s just not
coming. Each day he paces around his office, pulling
volumes from his book-covered walls and consulting
them carefully. Then he closes them firmly—pouf! Little
clouds of dust escape—and hurries to his desk to pour
great quantities of notes into his large notebook. But well
might he turn over ideas in his head and turn them over
again—nothing works. The book goes nowhere.
“One morning the exasperated philosopher exclaims
in a loud voice, “I would love to know what a dog, or a cat,
or an elephant would say if he had to explain why humans
are superior to animals!” At moment later, there is a tap
on the door. On the threshold stands a large red dog with
a big muzzle, a rough coat and ears raised, who says to
him: “Invite me in, my pretentious philosopher, and I will
explain to you why animals are superior to humans.” And
with one blow of his snout he brushes past the philosopher, enters his house, goes straight to the couch and installs himself there.

Born in 1923 and recently deceased after a long struggle with Parkinson's Disease, Matthew Lipman... more Born in 1923 and recently deceased after a long struggle with Parkinson's Disease, Matthew Lipman wrote this brief but detailed autobiography just before his illness made it impossible to write any more. It begins with memories of earliest childhood and his preoccupation with the possibility of being able to fly, moves through the years in which his family struggled with the effects of the Great Depression, through his service in the military during World War II, his discovery of the joy and beauty of philosophy, his quick academic rise at Columbia University, his sojourn in Paris, and his early and later career. " I feel for philosophy, " he writes in the last paragraph of this, his last book, " what an astronaut might feel at the sight of the earth's sphere, all green and brown and blue, as it appears from a space station. " He then expresses the hope that Philosophy for Children " will build a better and more reasonable world for our children and their children to inhabit: a world that looks as beautiful from across the street as it does from the distance of space. " (170) Lipman's memoir is a modest testimony to an extraordinary life-trajectory, and an exemplification of the philosopher as one with the form of double-vision— seeing life from outer space and from across the street—that is perhaps philosophy's most profound vocation.

Preface to "Inclusion, Diversity, and Intercultural Dialogue in Young People’s Philosophical Inqu... more Preface to "Inclusion, Diversity, and Intercultural Dialogue in Young People’s Philosophical Inquiry". Ching-Ching Lin & Lavina Sequiera, Eds. Sense Publishers, 2017. "In an age of acceleration, this volume of papers could be said to represent another generation, following fast on the heels of the last, of Philosophy for Children (P4C) and its distinctive pedagogical praxis, Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CPI). One senses that these papers are cries from the heart as much as communiqués from the intellect, goaded forward by the dramatic inequities of wealth and power, by the injustices and violations of human dignity and fundamental human rights that threaten us at this epochal moment. . . "

In this paper I trace the dialogical and narrative dimensions of the philosophical tradition and ... more In this paper I trace the dialogical and narrative dimensions of the philosophical tradition and explore how they are reconfigured in the notion of community of philosophical inquiry (CPI), the mainstay of the collection of novels and discussion plans known as Philosophy for Children. After considering the ontology and epistemology of dialogue, I argue that narrative has replaced exposition in our understanding of philosophical discourse and that CPI represents a narrative context in which truth comes to represent the best story, in a discursive location in which there are always multiple stories. Finally, I raise the issue of children's philosophical voice. Can children philosophize, and if they can, do they do so in a voice different from adults'? If so, what are the distinctive features of that voice? I assert that it is children's historical marginalization in the Western construction of rationality that now -as that rationality undergoes its crisismakes of them, like women and other "natives," privileged strangers to the tradition, who are, through CPI, enabled to enter it through dialogue and narrative.

This chapter offers a basic list of the sorts of basic critical reasoning moves, many of them emb... more This chapter offers a basic list of the sorts of basic critical reasoning moves, many of them embedded in the structure of language itself, that teachers can listen for when talking with children, and strategies for reinforcing them in the course of a
group conversation. The moves include agreeing or disagreeing, giving a reason, offering a proposition, example or counterexample, classifying, making a comparison, reasoning analogically, offering a definition, identifying an assumption, making an inference, making a conditional statement, self-correcting, restating, and entertaining different perspectives.

Childhood Philosophy, Jan 3, 2012

If there is one constant, uninvited guest in the typical public school classroom-or indeed in any... more If there is one constant, uninvited guest in the typical public school classroom-or indeed in any setting in which children gather in numbers-it is conflict. The transcripts from which I draw in this reflection on how young children think together about conflict reflect two four-part sets of conversations with two second grades in a small school of roughly 300 students in a predominantly middle to upper middle class suburban town in a heavily populated metropolitan area in the northeastern U.S. Most of the examples of conflict which the second graders chose to offer were located in their lives with friends or acquaintances or siblings, or incidents among adults that they had witnessed. There seemed to be a level of tolerance, even expectation and affirmation of these small conflicts in their lives; they had already become relatively "natural" occurrences for them. Large sections from four of the transcripts are included here, with commentary. In the first, conflict is represented by the group as a competition, either between two people or two possibilities only one of which can be fulfilled (the "fork in the road"). There is disagreement as to whether interpersonal conflict can be avoided. The second section revolves around the reorganizational or reconstructive potential of conflict. The third section takes up the question of whether we can say that there is conflict within nature beyond just living things -i.e. whether conflict can be considered a metaphysical or at least ontological principle. Transcript and analysis of arguments are accompanied by reflections on the differing social atmospheres of the two classes, their possible relationships to the discussion styles of the two, and on the possibility of a form of pedagogy which allows for the self-organizing character of group life and the role of conflict in the dialectics of development.

What happens when a small group of five year olds sits down with a philosophically sensitive teac... more What happens when a small group of five year olds sits down with a philosophically sensitive teacher, to talk about magic and science, or language, or witches and fairies? Is it possible to identify any recurring strategies of philosophical argumentation, or "moves" which function to build a larger, emergent argument? I want to try to follow a suspicion I have that the nature of collective dialogue is such that, when children as young as four converse in groups, and when some structure is provided by an at least moderately skilled facilitator of dialogue, that critical, creative, and collaborative kinds of thinking happen more or less spontaneously, and that there is an emergent structure of argument, which forms the horizon of every critical discussion.

The recent passing of Ann Sharp, Co-Founder and Associate Director of the Institute for the Advan... more The recent passing of Ann Sharp, Co-Founder and Associate Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, at the age of 68, has left many of us involved in
the movement of philosophy for/with children bereft, no doubt in many different ways. The warmth and intensity of her personal and professional focus, the simple clarity of her thinking, and her boundless energy in the work of international dissemination of the concept and practice of philosophizing with children, resonate even more sonorously in her
death. We thought it appropriate to try following at least one pathway backwards in her life story through the memory and testimony of her chief collaborator over a period of 35 years, Matthew Lipman. I interviewed Lipman, age 87, in the single room of the eldercare center in New Jersey that has become the site for his dogged and tenacious struggle with Parkinson’s Disease, and asked him to reflect on their long partnership. The transcript ends suddenly, not because we stopped talking, but because I stopped taping, sensing his fatigue, and suggesting that we return for another round, at which point we turned to other, less somber matters.

Teaching Philosophy, 2018

This paper seeks to identify the role of play in the design and function of Socratic dialogue as ... more 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.

Analytic Teaching and Philosophical Practice, 1994

"Late afternoon winter light entered the room obliquely, striking the seven assembled there as if... more "Late afternoon winter light entered the room obliquely, striking the seven assembled there as if in some final reckoning. They sat around the oblong table slumped in the padded chairs, exhausted, but strangely poised. No one had spoken since Jesse slammed out.. . "

This paper analyzes the phenomenon of community of philosophical inquiry in five structural dimen... more This paper analyzes the phenomenon of community of philosophical inquiry in five structural dimensions: gesture, language, mind, love, and interest (power). I call them "communities" because each of them is the expression of a communicative, interpretive process, converging on a common body of signs. Each is involved in a developmental process of change in which every member is determinative in some way of the group as a whole, yet the whole has an emergent character that transcends any one individual. Each community is uninterpretable in any complete sense apart from the others. Gesture and language have a certain primacy in that they are the exoteric systems through which the more esoteric bodies of signs of mind, interest, and love are expressed, but that expression is always only a translation, and both gesture and language may in a deeper sense be said to have their origins in the other three communities.

In Ronald Reed, Ed., When We Talk: Essays on Classroom Conversation. Fort Worth, TX: Analytic Tea... more In Ronald Reed, Ed., When We Talk: Essays on Classroom Conversation. Fort Worth, TX: Analytic Teaching Press, Texas Wesleyan University, 1992.
I want to distinguish roughly between three kinds of young children's discourse in educational settings. On one end of a continuum there is school discourse in its classical form. Its major characteristic is an order imposed by a central adult authority, around whose cues topic initiation and maintenance, turn-taking conventions, speaker-listener interchanges, and conversational repair are practiced and internalized. On the other end of the continuum is the discourse of children left to themselves--the language of dramatic play, of the playground, of groups sitting around without a teacher-or we may even say, groups "out of control” in a classroom setting. This is a discourse much more difficult to capture in its structural patterns, given its wildly playful modalities. It is the sort of language event whose inner logic tends to be hidden in apparent randomness or chaos, rather than self-consciously imposed. The text here under interrogation is an example of a third sort, and it falls somewhere between these poles. It is not didactic discourse or spontaneous (un-adult-erated) discourse, but what may in a loose sense be called philosophical discourse.

Introduction: What follows is one piece of a series of conversations that I conducted with a smal... more Introduction: What follows is one piece of a series of conversations that I conducted with a small group of young children in a day care center where I was working in 1983. The children were between the ages of 3 and 6, and we had been together long enough to speak frankly and comfortably with each other. I used small group time to ask six questions, all of them about the ultimate issues - the origins, ends, and limits of things, death, dreams, soul, spirit, self, God, evil. Taken together, the conversations we had make for a transcript of 65 manuscript pages. The issues raised there are many, and provoke questions not only about how young children think, but how adults influence them to think. The issues taken up below - the origins of things - was continued past this conversation.

Hermans , is known as "dialogical self theory," hereafter referred to as DST. A theory of human s... more Hermans , is known as "dialogical self theory," hereafter referred to as DST. A theory of human subjectivity and psychological development, it understands itself to be drawn from the conceptual work of William James, George Herbert Mead, Lev Vygotsky and Mikhail Bakhtin. It could be said to represent one more contender in the Western struggle to break out of (or, speaking dialectically, to outgrow) the Cartesian paradigm of self-understanding associated with Western modernism--the discrete, ahistorical, individualistic, isolated self-and to transition to an understanding of self as relational, multiple, polyphonic and polyvalent, deeply structured and determined by alterity, and comprised of "selfpositions" that are both internal and external, and which are, in Bahktin's words, "fated to the condition of dialogue" (p. 91).

In the continental tradition, the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer on dialogue has provided new insight... more In the continental tradition, the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer on dialogue has provided new insight into the structure and dynamics of the community of inquiry. In his drive to reappropriate Aristotelian phronesis, or practical reason, for post-Enlightenment Western thought, Gadamer has shown us how dialogue is a unique epistemological event, a form of knowledge which can only be arrived at through a process that is collective and dialectical. As such, it provides an epistemological model for an event-setting of the classsroom that is emergent and interactive, and which promises, if we can learn to move in it, to transform the way we teach.

The self is a historical and cultural phenomenon in the sense of a dialectically evolving narrati... more The self is a historical and cultural phenomenon in the sense of a dialectically evolving narrative construct about who we are, what our borders and limits and capacities are, what is pathology, and what is normality, and so on. These ontological and epistemological narratives are usually linked to grand explanatory narratives like science and religion, and are intimately linked to cosmological pictures. The “intersubject” is an emergent form of subjectivity in our time which reconstructs its borders to include the other, and which understands itself as always building and being built through a combination of internal and external dialogue. The shift from monological
to dialogical discourse is both a product and a producer of the intersubject, and is in turn made possible by a shift—underway for the last one hundred years or so—in the human information environment. The major educational
innovation which reconstructs theory and practice for the intersubject—community of philosophical inquiry (CPI)—assumes, following field and systems theory, that any group gathered together is an interactive system. It also assumes
that the fundamental forms of growth and development both of the individual and of the collective take place through a process of communal deliberative inquiry into meaning, resulting in the reconstruction of beliefs, values, and discourses on both an individual and a collective level. CPI is a process in which subject and object are both active and passive, shaping
and being shaped, determining and determined, in and through their transaction. It assumes that its interlocutors are in a relation of both mutual and self-interrogation. As the phenomenon of the intersubject gains credence in human culture, philosophy is gaining power as an educational idea in the elementary and high school classroom. Communal philosophical dialogue is the discursive space where the subject’s fundamental assumptions about self, world, knowledge, belief, beauty, right action and normative ideals
enter a dialectical process of confrontation, mediation, and reconstruction.

The most distinctive feature of the theory and practice of community of philosophical inquiry (CP... more The most distinctive feature of the theory and practice of community of philosophical inquiry (CPI), which at first glance appears contradictory, is how it promotes both communal, intersubjective meaning and thinking for oneself. Typically we think of the two as, if not opposed, then not particularly related. Thinking for oneself is usually associated with 18th century Western Enlightenment -the automatic problematization of collectively held beliefs - skepticism, and individualism. Community is usually associated with the affirmation of collectively held beliefs and assumptions, and with the necessary sacrifice of individual opinion for a greater good.

This article traces the development of the theory and practice of what is known as ‘community of ... more This article traces the development of the theory and practice
of what is known as ‘community of inquiry’ as an ideal of
classroom praxis. The concept has ancient and uncertain
origins, but was seized upon as a form of pedagogy by the
originators of the Philosophy for Children program in the
1970s. Its location at the intersection of the discourses of
argumentation theory, communications theory, semiotics,
systems theory, dialogue theory, learning theory and group
psychodynamics makes of it a rich site for the dialogue
between theory and practice in education. This article is an
exploration of those intersections, and a prospectus of its
possible role in the formation and reformulation of school
curriculum. It will be argued here that, when formulated as
community of philosophical inquiry in particular, it offers the
possibility of ‘philosophising’ the school curriculum in
general, by extending the concept-work that doing philosophy
entails to all of the disciplines. The article begins with an
attempt at an operational definition of the term as, move to an
analysis of its dynamics, offers an example of its use in a
mathematics classroom, and finishes with a schematic view of
its whole-curriculum and whole-school possibilities

I n a previous paper, we introduced the notion of pedagogical imposition, and argued for its impo... more I n a previous paper, we introduced the notion of pedagogical imposition, and argued for its importance in understanding the psychodynamics of CI. Practitioners of Cl usually define themselves as engaged in a liberatory pedagogy - that is, a form of teaching which avoids imposition on or manipulation
of students. This paper will argue that, if we view the classroom as a system, this is a naive assumption. This argument is based, in turn, on our assumption that, first, any interactive system involves relations of power; and second, that any specifically pedagogical system involves unequal relations of power. But
our argument will go further, and claim that in fact that in any system, relations of power are always ambiguous and shifting. Power may be exercised coercively or subversively, but any equilibrium which pretends to finality presupposes either stagnation of the system or its death.

This paper, published in Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education, 7 (2) ... more This paper, published in Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education, 7 (2) July 2010, considers the psychosocial and cognitive dynamics of an educational community of
inquiry as an inquiring system. It identifies seven characteristics of social systems dedicated to
inquiry that are open (as opposed to “control” systems)—autopoiesis, teleology, feedback, noise,
redundancy, ambiguous control, and system “event”—and traces their function in the ongoing
reconstruction of argument that collective, dialogical inquiry entails. The paper also analyzes the
process of group inquiry from a dialectical perspective, interpreting conceptual and argumentation
system development as a continuously emergent process of reorganization, which makes its way
through the ongoing resolution of the oppositions and contradictions it encounters, resulting in
greater organizational complexity and clarity. Rather than maintaining homeostatic stability by
rejecting or resisting noise, it develops through accepting and incorporating it in the interest of
dialectical emergence. The role of a facilitator in such a system is to provide both positive and
negative feedback, navigating between system entropy and system chaos. Finally, the autopoietic
inquiring system is offered as one exemplar of the “ideal speech situation,” which requires that all
its members have equal opportunity to participate in and contribute to system emergence, free
from internal constraints or external coercion. This implies the need for a pedagogy that not only
develops communicative competence, but which models a form of argumentation that understands
itself as a collective project of ongoing reconstruction—with the major goal of agreement arrived
at through open, free communication.

Community of philosophical inquiry (CPI) is a way of practicing philosophy in a group which is ch... more Community of philosophical inquiry (CPI) is a way of practicing philosophy in a group which is characterized by conversation; which creates its discussion agenda from questions which are posed by the conversants as a response to some stimulus—whether text or some other media--and which includes discussion of specific philosophers or philosophical traditions, if at all, only in order to develop its own ideas together about the concepts under discussion. The epistemological conviction of community of philosophical inquiry is that communal dialogue, facilitated by a philosophically educated person, recapitulates and reconstructs the major elements--and even positions or claims--of the tradition, in one form or another, through the distributed thinking characteristic of dialogical discourse. The pedagogical locus of control of CPI is the group as a whole, which is understood as potentially self-regulating through a process of ongoing dialectical transformation. The role of the facilitator is to act, among other things, from the Socratic “position of ignorance,” as a bridge between concepts and arguments, and as a trigger for conceptual system transformation.

In Educating for Complex Thinking through PhilosophicalInquiry. Models, Advances, and Proposals for the New Millennium, M. Santi & S. Oliverio, Eds. Napoli: Liguori, 2012., 2012

This paper argues that the development of concepts in community of philosophical inquiry tend to ... more This paper argues that the development of concepts in community of philosophical inquiry tend to operate through a dialectical interplay of, after Deleuze and Guattari, arborescent and rhizomatic movements. It also offer three possible models for organizing inquiry into the common, central and contestable concepts within the school disciplines--a single-discipline, an inter-disciplinary, and a whole-curriculum approach.

This paper addresses, in psychohistorical, philosophical and educational terms, the emergence of ... more This paper addresses, in psychohistorical, philosophical and educational terms, the emergence of and prospects for the practice of a specific form of philosophical pedagogy in an online environment. It explores a form of structured group dialogue known as “community of philosophical inquiry,” a communal critical thinking discourse that reflects the ongoing transformation of the contemporary information environment into a hybrid zone which combines the literate, the oral, and the imagistic. After a description and analysis of the structure and process of CPI as a complex system, a discussion of the distinctive pedagogical role of a CPI facilitator, and a genealogical look at the post modern information environment, the paper explores how this “ideal speech situation,” which is also a hybrid, is challenged or enhanced through its insertion into the post modern information environment, and how it satisfies the conditions for the communicative ideal of social democracy.

The quiet revolution that Matthew Lipman inaugurated in educational theory and practice in his Ph... more The quiet revolution that Matthew Lipman inaugurated in educational theory and practice in his Philosophy for Children program has two inseparable dimensions. The first—introducing philosophy as a subject matter in the elementary school through a series of philosophical novels written for children --is curricular. Of course this is more than just curricular, because it is based on the idea—contested by “real philosophers” since Plato-- that childhood is an appropriate stage of life to read, think and talk about philosophical issues like justice, friendship, what we mean by self, the nature of thinking, the body-mind relation, what it means to be “good,” and so on. As such, it is an idea that follows from a change in the way some adults understand children as thinkers, meaning-makers, communicators and moral agents; it is a philosophical idea itself. And not only that, but it opens naturally into the realization that all school curriculum—each of the disciplines—has a philosophical dimension, and that this dimension is the very one that makes it most meaningful, and therefore most necessary for education to be meaningful for children.
The second dimension is pedagogical. It is the idea that a guided, structured, dialogical speech community—a theory and a practice that Lipman, taking a cue from his friend and mentor Justus Buchler, developed and called “community of philosophical inquiry”--is the most appropriate way to practice with students the philosophical curriculum that he had developed. This idea is also a philosophical one, and has far reaching implications, both practical and theoretical--for learning theory, for a theory of teaching, for argumentation theory, for theory of knowledge, for group psychology, for moral education, and perhaps ultimately of the greatest importance, for grounded political theory and practice, not only in classrooms and schools, but in a society peopled by the human subjects that emerge from those classrooms and schools. Lipman’s community of philosophical inquiry (CPI) is not just a pedagogical device, but the projection of an ideal speech community dedicated to a normative form of democratic practice--one that mediates the relationship between democracy as a form of social inquiry and dialogical philosophical inquiry as a form of communicative practice. Published in Education and Culture 28, 2 (2013): 36-53.

This paper argues that the return of philosophy to schools of education, while not possible in it... more This paper argues that the return of philosophy to schools of education, while not possible in its previous form as a distinct sub-discipline, is possible in the form of (post) Socratic pedagogy emerging as a distinctive methodology in all classrooms dedicated to teacher preparation. This pedagogy is already present in the theory and practice of what is known as “community of philosophical inquiry,” On this dialectical model, the return of philosophy to schools of education will come from “below,” emerging in the classroom itself as a discursive form--a way of talking that problematizes and works to reconstruct common, central, and contestable concepts in education through communal philosophical dialogue, whether the specific focus of any given course be curriculum, teaching, governance, or some other. Community of philosophical inquiry represents an integration of philosophy and education such that the problematization, deconstruction and reconstruction of concepts becomes a fundamental aspect of all educational discourse. As such, a methods class will be as concerned with problematizing the concept of “method” itself as cataloging currently available methods, and courses in administration will be concerned to problematize concepts like power, authority, freedom, control, and so on. So positioned, philosophy directly confronts the regimes of truth of the world of educational theory and practice. Rather than isolated in a speculative realm--a realm where its very freedom from the constraints of practice condemns it to triviality--educational philosophy is here thrust into confrontation with the rutted habits of educational theory and practice, and is in a position to directly challenge the fatalism and presentism—indeed, the almost active anti-utopianism—that characterizes much of the public school realm.

Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 2000

Marcuse's Neew Sensibility, Neoteny, and Progressive SchoolingL Utopian Prospects, 2012

This paper argues that Marcuse's "new sensibility" as a form of subjectivity is already invoked a... more This paper argues that Marcuse's "new sensibility" as a form of subjectivity is already invoked as an ideal in 1) certain Western heretical and/or "esoteric" psycho-spiritual traditions; 2) in Romantic and post-Romantic formulations of the "renovation of perception" as a developmental ideal; and 3) in libertarian socialist, anarchist, and progressive educational theory and practice. Further, it argues, based on the concept of neoteny, that the adult-child collective

CIVITAS EDUCATIONIS. EDUCATION, POLITICS AND CULTURE, 2019

I would like to try to identify some general philosophical themes that I understand as fundamenta... more I would like to try to identify some general philosophical themes that I understand as fundamental to the anarchist vision, and which I see as implicit in all the papers offered here. I present them as binaries, albeit with the understanding that experience tends to confound binaries and binaries tend to distort experience, and are, finally, overcome only in the poetic realm. My hope is that these thematics may help us to reflect on and to explore how the anarchist vision—which I understand as inherently prophetic—applies to education, and even more specifically to the form of education that we call school.

Between World and System: Schooling and Western Mind, 1987

This paper takes its bearings· from two fundamental assumptions. First, that nationalized schoo... more This paper takes its bearings· from two fundamental assumptions. First, that nationalized schooling is an artifact of collective mind: its formal aspects are a representative expression of those aspects of human object relations and the ordering and expression of those relations which are culturally and historically determined. Second, that the professed importance of education to the Western individual and social vision, and the particular nature of the objects of schooling, children, place the school in a relationship to historical mind which, more than other institutions which also express collective consciousness (e.g. the factory, or funeral home) , is interactive. That is, the Western school is not only shaped by, but shapes Western mind. This makes it possible to suggest that a historical-dialectical movement in Western noetics would not only change the school, but itself be a result of that change.The first assumption leads to the question: what is this "Western mind" 'which the public school--that model world of "professional" actors, with its strictly linearized time, neutralized space, rigid bureaucracy, and standardized curricula built on "scientific" learning and teaching notions--represents? This question is answered by an analysis of what is termed "theoretical consciousness" in the context of a broad analysis of the history of the child-adult relation in the West, and the school's part in that relation. This allows the second assumption to generate the question: what would a school based on a historically transformed Western mind look like?

Play and Democracy: Philosophical Perspectives. , 2022

This paper explores the role of that form of educational play known as “community of philosophica... more This paper explores the role of that form of educational play known as “community of philosophical inquiry”—that is, the practice of communal philosophical dialogue
organized as an ideal speech situation—in the emergence of a culture of social democracy, by
which I mean (after John Dewey) those habits of mind and relational norms that are necessary conditions for the success of political democracy. I will begin by exploring the status of social democracy as a normative evolutionary ideal in Western cultural, social and political theory, and its utopian promise of what social theorist Herbert Marcuse called a “new sensibility,” and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm a particular form of “social character” that, I will suggest, operationalizes that sensibility. I will then argue that the form of educational practice that arose concomitantly with the “invention” of political democracy in Athens in sixth and fifth
centuries B.C., known as “skholé,” provides us with an institutional archetype for the cultivation of democratic sensibilities based on a form intergenerational encounter grounded in multidisciplinary inquiry, dialogue and participatory democratic governance, and informed by what Friedrich Schiller called the “play drive.” I will argue that this encounter is epitomized in skholé in the regular practice of CPI, understood as a form of deep play; and that the structural dynamics of CPI act to foster democratic habits and sensibilities among regular
participants in this form of group dialogue.

Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 2020

This paper explores the genealogy of a form of collective intelligence that cultivates the democr... more This paper explores the genealogy of a form of collective intelligence
that cultivates the democratic social character, understood as a style
of subjectivity that is implicitly dedicated to the experience of living
both individually and collectively in what H. Hermans has termed the
“challenge” zone of “the dynamic interplay of I-positions within the
self,” and practiced in negotiating the boundary-crossings implicit in
the “increasing heterogeneity of I-positions” that results from an
ever-increasing “interface of globalization and localization” that is the
post-modern situation. The historical emergence of a democratic psychoclass
is linked with an emergent form of culturally mediated subjectivity
that acts to “recover the continuum between our ‘first
nature’ and our ‘second nature’, our natural world and our social
world, our biological being and our rationality, leading to a society
organized under a new reality principle. I then explore a form of education
that has been present in latent or manifest form as long as
democratic values and aspirations have been present in the Western
social and political imaginary, and argue that it is intimately linked to
the same impulse that this new reality principle represents. Its evolutionary
potential is fed by what psychohistorian L. DeMause identified
as a dialectical advance in childrearing “modes,” whereby adults enter
into dialogue with childhood forms of intentionality, resulting in the
reinvention of school as an adult–child collective that acts as a facilitating environment for the emergence of a psychoclass dedicated to
dialogue, democracy and ongoing personal and social reconstruction

Studies in Philosophy and Education, 2020

This paper argues that children as members of a perennial psychoclass represent one potential van... more This paper argues that children as members of a perennial psychoclass represent one potential 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. I argue from Herbert Marcuse's prophetic invocation of a "new sensibility," which is characterized by an increase in instinctual revulsion towards violence, domination and exploitation (whether personal or structural) and, correspondingly, a greater sensitivity to all forms of life. As the embodiment of a form of philosophical "post-animism" or hylo-zoism, it represents the evolutionary shift that, it could be argued, our species requires for survival at this historical moment. I suggest 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 John Dewey called "impulse" and "habit," I argue for a form, or archetype of schooling first articulated in ancient Greece called skholé, a space that functions, according to Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, as a "meeting place," a "form of gathering and action" dedicated to inquiry, and not to the production of calculated, preordained outcomes-a space removed from the world of production, and characterized by a form of temporality associated with childhood: aion, or "timeless time," as opposed to kronos, or linear time. Skholé is dedicated to emergence and cultural reconstruction , which follows from an educative relationship between adults and children based on understanding the latter as bearers of the "novel," and on a faith in the "reorganizing potentialities" of childhood impulse, or interest-that is, on natality as a fundamental principle of cultural evolution.

Children's Environments Quarterly, 1989

A proposed 22,000 square foot Children's Center was designed for the child care needs of 240 chil... more A proposed 22,000 square foot Children's Center was designed for the child care needs of 240 children at Northern Michigan University. The proposed Center was designed to achieve a developmentally optimal level of complexity and challenge, and to empower children and their caregivers to allow them freedom of movement and access, freedom of choice, freedom to plan and initiate, and the opportunity for privacy equivalent to a high quality home situation. In keeping with this conceptual framework, the designers produced a modified village plan, i.e., one building, but of asymmetrical design, that rambles coherently, castle-like, in the sense of a small "city." The overall vision was for a self sufficient community of children and adults, its organic irregularities and asymmetries comfortable within a balanced whole, thereby creating a space that would be both adventurous and conquerable for young children. Various groups and facilities would be plotted artfully throughout, both separate and yet interconnected. The larger units would be connected by transitional spaces like enclosed courtyards, or walkways with visual connections to other units, and shared areas. Principle authors: Gary T. Moore and James L. Piwoni

This chapter contrasts the aims of progressive and traditional state-mandated schooling, and argu... more This chapter contrasts the aims of progressive and traditional state-mandated schooling, and argues that the former represents a new form in the history of Western education, oriented to individual, social and moral reconstruction rather than reproduction, and guided by the evolutionary possibilities inherent in human neoteny. The school is identified as a key site for the reconstruction of civic virtue in its role as a "just community" or embryonic society grounded in the principles and practices of participatory democracy.

This paper assumes a correlation between the structures of educational environments and forms of ... more This paper assumes a correlation between the structures of educational environments and forms of educational discourse. If the larger, structural configurations of an educational environment are not reasonable-i.e., are based on domination, hierarchy, and self.perpetuating goals and processes which are rigid and unreflective-then neither much of the behavior nor the language events in that environment will be reasonable either. Second, although in certain heroic and exemplary cases, discourse transforms structure, in the vast number of cases, structure determines discourse. The paper goes on to argue that a model that fully accomodates community of philosophical inquiry discourse ihas four characteristics: it is developmental, environmental, individualized, and interactive.

This paper seeks to address the question of schooling for democracy by, first, identifying at lea... more 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.

Published in Civitas Educationis: Education, Politics, and Culture 1,1 (June 2012): 55-72., 2012

This paper argues that Marcuse’s “new sensibility” as a form of subjectivity is already invoked a... more This paper argues that Marcuse’s “new sensibility” as a form of subjectivity is already invoked as an ideal in 1) certain Western heretical and/or “esoteric” psycho-spiritual traditions; 2) in Romantic and post-Romantic formulations of the “renovation of perception” as a developmental ideal; and 3) in libertarian socialist, anarchist, and progressive educational theory and practice. Further, it argues, based on the concept of neoteny, that the adult-child collective called school is a primary cultural site for the reconstruction of the relation between impulse and habit that the new sensibility represents

This paper traces the changing status of the school as a counter culture in the anthropological a... more 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 19 th 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 19 th and early 20 th 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 paper argues that children represent one vanguard of an emergent shift in Western subjectivi... more This paper 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 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, 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.

In this essay David Kennedy argues that children represent one vanguard of an emergent shift in W... more 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 (CPI), 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 (such as " alive, " " justice, " " system, " and " 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. School as Archetype In this essay, I aim to offer one normative definition of " school " as a form of intentional community in which certain social, psychological, and political possibilities are present in the purposeful interaction between youth and age that act as agents of cumulative cultural evolution, or " cultural ratcheting. " 1 I argue that school, when organized as a purposeful site of intergenerational dialogue or " meeting " in the strong sense, opens spaces for the ongoing reconstruction of habit and belief that are promised both in the long period of neuronal development offered by human childhood, or " neoteny " ; and by the related phenomenon of " paedomorphism, " or the extent to which Homo sapiens, in comparison with its forebears, is marked throughout the life cycle by both physiological and psychological characteristics that are childlike. 2 But I also argue that, while (1) political democratization and class mobility — the rise, specifically, of a new class of " free men " in fifth-century BC Athens that challenged aristocratic hegemony 3 — first created a social space for the emergence of this form of adult–child collective, (2) the school's full potential as a transformative social and cultural institution has only been realized through a widespread transformation of 1. Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate

This paper offers a genealogy of dialogic education, tracing its origins in Romantic epistemology... more 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 (and therefore of adults as well), 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

The physical, perceptual, and cognitive differences between adults and young children have signif... more The physical, perceptual, and cognitive differences between adults and young children have significant implications for the design of child care centers. This article considers first how architecture influences children's development, then the differences between how young children and adults experience and use space and then the problem of designing collective space for young children that is responsive to those differences. Four broad, qualitative characteristics of optimal child care centers are identified: that they be homelike, have an unfinished character, have an open relationship to the natural world, and provide an overall variety and balance of kinds of spaces.

This paper is an exploration of, and an attempt to broadly define some basic architectural elemen... more This paper is an exploration of, and an attempt to broadly define some basic architectural elements necessary for the "domestication" of all-day, educational care settings. It will combine review of literature and reflection in three areas: the psychological dynamics of architectural space, the way young children experience space, and the architectural programmatics of institutional space.

In In E. Marsal, B. Weber & S.T. Gardner (Eds.). Respect: How Do We Get There? pp. 35-46. Zurich:... more In In E. Marsal, B. Weber & S.T. Gardner (Eds.). Respect: How Do We Get There? pp. 35-46. Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2013. This paper argues that the neotenic school is a cultural site—in our time and place anyway--where the historical a priori of a free society has a place within which to emerge and grow, through a process in which both child and adult are active participants. This is in direct contrast to the historical function of schooling under capitalism and the nation state; in fact it may be found to be in direct contrast to traditional education in all its forms, beginning with the tribal initiation hut, which is dedicated—if not by its own nature, then by those who control it from above--to minimizing difference, creativity and ongoing social reconstruction in the interest of gerontocratic structures of domination. This suggests that at this crisis point in our species history our global situation of crisis has obliged us to undertake a radical re-evaluation of the value and role of childhood in bio-cultural (i.e. brain-based) and cultural and social evolution, a re-evaluation that is summarized in the biological and psychological concept of neoteny, which in fact only emerged in the latter half of the 19th century. It is just the qualities of childhood that adults require in order to reverse the trend towards planetary dystopia; and it is just education in the form of the adult-child collective of school--understood as a laboratory for the germination of a form of modal subjectivity that is, in Marcuse’s words, “grounded in an experience of nature as a totality of life to be protected and cultivated”—that provides the developmental niche for such an ongoing evolutionary project.

This text is an attempt to offer a reading of Incendies, a 2010 Canadian film written and directe... more This text is an attempt to offer a reading of Incendies, a 2010 Canadian film written and directed by Denis Villeneuve, adapted from Wajdi Mouawad's play of the same name in the light of Lyotard's notion of infantia. From this perspective, we can make a distinction between childhood as a temporal human stage, and infantia as an atemporal human condition: infantia may be described as the difference between what can and can not be said-the unsayable, something lost that inhabits, imperceptibly, the speakable as its shadow, its reminder, an unspoken that works as a condition of possibility in order that something meaningful could be said. As such it is a form of the inhuman, opposed to the other form of the inhuman, called "development, " " competition," "representative democracy," "the market," "free world," or simply " capitalism. " Lyotard affirms that the political task of literature and art is to remember the former inhuman, the one that each human soul carries by the fact of having been born from a forced need to abandon its condition of indeterminacy. " Political, " for Lyotard, is the resistance to the inhumanity of the capitalist order by means of remembering the inhuman from which every order emerges. This is the aesthetic and political strength of Incendies: to present to us, through its heroine, " the woman who sings, " an appeal to remember the silenced inhuman from which we come, and which our social life has made us forget.

Childhood & Philosophy, 2008

In this dialogue between two interlocutors, the ontology of childhood is considered, first from t... more In this dialogue between two interlocutors, the ontology of childhood is considered, first from the point of view of temporality, then power, then language, then from the perspective of philosophy, and inquires whether there is a specific philosophical and/or childlike dialectic of questioning and answering. The claim is made that both the philosopher and the artist carry a childlike way of questioning and acting on the world into adulthood. The discussion then moves to education, and considers the possibility of reconstructing the latter beyond the Platonic notions of "formation," reproduction, discipline and subjection, and evaluates the role of philosophical dialogue in a school setting as an agent of transformation.

Childhood Philosophy, Jul 29, 2014

This conversation offers a discussion of the meaning, sense and social function of school, both a... more 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 (free-time, leisure). It also discusses the different types of Greek time (aion, kairos, khronos): 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?

Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 2000

Childhood, philosophy and dialogical education, 2024

Childhood, Philosophy and Dialogical Education: (R)evolutionary Essays is a utopian, childlike an... more Childhood, Philosophy and Dialogical Education: (R)evolutionary Essays is a utopian, childlike and philosophical book by David Knowles Kennedy. At the same time, it is a dialogical and mature synthesis of decades of studying and practicing communities of philosophical inquiry. These first two sentences might seem in contradiction, especially when we think about the adjective childlike. Therefore, it might be delicate with the readers to unfold some of their meanings and senses.

The recent passing of Ann Sharp, Co-Founder and Associate Director of the Institute for the Advan... more The recent passing of Ann Sharp, Co-Founder and Associate Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, at the age of 68, has left many of us involved in the movement of philosophy for/with children bereft, no doubt in many different ways. The warmth and intensity of her personal and professional focus, the simple clarity of her thinking, and her boundless energy in the work of international dissemination of the concept and practice of philosophizing with children, resonate even more sonorously in her death. We thought it appropriate to try following at least one pathway backwards in her life story through the memory and testimony of her chief collaborator over a period of 35 years, Matthew Lipman. I interviewed Lipman, age 87, in the single room of the eldercare center in New Jersey that has become the site for his dogged and tenacious struggle with Parkinson's Disease, and asked him to reflect on their long partnership. The transcript ends suddenly, not because we stopped talking, but because I stopped taping, sensing his fatigue, and suggesting that we return for another round, at which point we turned to other, less somber matters.

childhood & philosophy, 2021

This book may be described as a Festschrift—or more accurately a Gedenkschrift, given that it is ... more This book may be described as a Festschrift—or more accurately a Gedenkschrift, given that it is a posthumous celebration of Gareth Matthews’ (1929-2011) 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.

Yearbook of The National Society for The Study of Education, 2013

This paper contrasts the aims of progressive and traditional state mandated schooling, and argues... more This paper contrasts the aims of progressive and traditional state mandated schooling, and argues that the former represents a new form in the history of Western education, oriented to individual, social and moral reconstruction rather than reproduction, and guided by the evolutionary possibilities inherent in human neoteny. The school is identified as a key site for the reconstruction of civic virtue in its role as a "just community" or embryonic society grounded in the principles and practices of participatory democracy.

Civitas educationis. Education, Politics, and Culture, 2015

: This paper argues that Marcuse’s “new sensibility” as a form of subjectivity is already invoked... more : This paper argues that Marcuse’s “new sensibility” as a form of subjectivity is already invoked as an ideal 1) in certain Western heretical and/or “esoteric” psycho-spiritual traditions; 2) in Romantic and post-Romantic formulations of the “renovation of perception” as a developmental ideal; and 3) in libertarian socialist, anarchist, and progressive educational theory and practice. Further, it argues, based on the concept of neoteny, that the adult-child collective called school is a primary cultural site for the reconstruction of the relation between impulse and habit that the new sensibility represents. Riassunto : Questo saggio argomenta che la “nuova sensibilita” di Marcuse in quanto forma di soggettivita e gia stata invocata come ideale 1) in certe tradizioni psico-spirituali eretiche e/o “esoteriche” dell’Occidente; 2) nelle formulazioni romantiche e post-romantiche di un “rinnovamento della percezione” come ideale evolutivo; 3) nelle teorie e pratiche educative libertario...

childhood & philosophy, 2010

The recent passing of Ann Sharp, Co-Founder and Associate Director of the Institute for the Advan... more The recent passing of Ann Sharp, Co-Founder and Associate Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, at the age of 68, has left many of us involved in the movement of philosophy for/with children bereft, no doubt in many different ways. The warmth and intensity of her personal and professional focus, the simple clarity of her thinking, and her boundless energy in the work of international dissemination of the concept and practice of philosophizing with children, resonate even more sonorously in her death. We thought it appropriate to try following at least one pathway backwards in her life story through the memory and testimony of her chief collaborator over a period of 35 years, Matthew Lipman. I interviewed Lipman, age 87, in the single room of the eldercare center in New Jersey that has become the site for his dogged and tenacious struggle with Parkinson’s Disease, and asked him to reflect on their long partnership. The transcript ends suddenly, not...

My Name is Myshkin is a philosophical novel for children 10 years and older, which explores theme... more My Name is Myshkin is a philosophical novel for children 10 years and older, which explores themes in philosophy of science, environmental philosophy, and philosophy of mythology through dialogue. The story takes place in the context of an adventure tale set in the near future, in which two children find themselves in the deep woods and they stumble upon a seemingly abandoned villa. (Series: Philosophy in Schools / Philosophie in der Schule / Philosophie a l'Ecole - Vol. 17)

childhood & philosophy, 2011

This review of Matthew Lipman’s autobiography, A Life Teaching Thinking, is a reflection on the t... more This review of Matthew Lipman’s autobiography, A Life Teaching Thinking, is a reflection on the themes and patterns of his extraordinarily productive career. His book begins with memories of earliest childhood and his preoccupation with the possibility of being able to fly, moves through the years in which his family struggled with the effects of the Great Depression, through his service in the military during World War II, his discovery of the joy and beauty of philosophy, his academic rise at Columbia University, his Fullbright sojourn in Paris, and his early and later career. Lipman’s educational project led in four related directions: the practice of philosophy for children, which he invented, and which presents an epistemological challenge to a second field, philosophy of education, which is as startling as was Rousseau’s two hundred years before. Third, it led to a realm of theory called philosophy of childhood, upon which the practice of philosophy for children is a kind of a...

Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 2020

This paper explores the genealogy of a form of collective intelligence that cultivates the democr... more This paper explores the genealogy of a form of collective intelligence that cultivates the democratic social character, understood as a style of subjectivity that is implicitly dedicated to the experience of living both individually and collectively in what H. Hermans has termed the “challenge” zone of “the dynamic interplay of I-positions within the self,” and practiced in negotiating the boundary-crossings implicit in the “increasing heterogeneity of I-positions” that results from an ever-increasing “interface of globalization and localization” that is the post-modern situation. The historical emergence of a democratic psychoclass is linked with an emergent form of culturally mediated subjectivity that acts to “recover the continuum between our ‘first nature’ and our ‘second nature’, our natural world and our social world, our biological being and our rationality, leading to a society organized under a new reality principle. I then explore a form of education that has been present in latent or manifest form as long as democratic values and aspirations have been present in the Western social and political imaginary, and argue that it is intimately linked to the same impulse that this new reality principle represents. Its evolutionary potential is fed by what psychohistorian L. DeMause identified as a dialectical advance in childrearing “modes,” whereby adults enter into dialogue with childhood forms of intentionality, resulting in the reinvention of school as an adult–child collective that acts as a facilitating environment for the emergence of a psychoclass dedicated to dialogue, democracy and ongoing personal and social reconstruction

The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, 1998

The Western onto-theological tradition has long been preoccupied with two symbolizations of child... more The Western onto-theological tradition has long been preoccupied with two symbolizations of childhood. One conceives of it as an original unity of being and knowing, an exemplar of completed identity. The other conceives of childhood as deficit and danger, an exemplar of the untamed appetite and the uncontrolled will. In the economy of Plato and Aristotle’s tripartite self, the child is ontogenetically out of balance. She is incapable of bringing the three parts of the self into a right hierarchal relation based on the domination of reason. In other words, attaining adulthood means eradicating the child. Freud’s reformulation of the Platonic community of self combines the two symbolizations. His model creates an opening for shifting power relations between the elements of the self. He opens the way toward what Kristeva calls the "subject-in-process," a pluralism of relationships rather than an organization constituted by exclusions and hierarchies. After Freud, the child c...

Studies in Philosophy and Education, 2020

This paper argues that children as members of a perennial psychoclass represent one potential van... more This paper argues that children as members of a perennial psychoclass represent one potential 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. I argue from Herbert Marcuse’s prophetic invocation of a “new sensibility,” which is characterized by an increase in instinctual revulsion towards violence, domination and exploitation (whether personal or structural) and, correspondingly, a greater sensitivity to all forms of life. As the embodiment of a form of philosophical “post-animism” or hylozoism, it represents the evolutionary shift that, it could be argued, our species requires for survival at this historical moment. I suggest 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 John Dewey called “impulse” and “habit,” I argue for a form, or archetype of schooling first articulated in ancient Greece called skholé, a space that functions, according to Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, as a “meeting place,” a “form of gathering and action” dedicated to inquiry, and not to the production of calculated, preordained outcomes—a space removed from the world of production, and characterized by a form of temporality associated with childhood: aion, or “timeless time,” as opposed to kronos, or linear time. Skholé is dedicated to emergence and cultural reconstruction, which follows from an educative relationship between adults and children based on understanding the latter as bearers of the “novel,” and on a faith in the “reorganizing potentialities” of childhood impulse, or interest—that is, on natality as a fundamental principle of cultural evolution.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2018

Teaching Philosophy, 2018

Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 1991

Metaphilosophy, 2004

Abstract: Community of philosophical inquiry (CPI) is a way of practicing philosophy in a group t... more Abstract: Community of philosophical inquiry (CPI) is a way of practicing philosophy in a group that is characterized by conversation; that creates its discussion agenda from questions posed by the conversants as a response to some stimulus (whether text or some other media); ...

Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 1993

Fools and children--particularly infants and young children—proliferate in the wisdom traditions ... more Fools and children--particularly infants and young children—proliferate in the wisdom traditions of the world. Both are outsiders to, and subversive of, the positive, adult male tradition of knowledge. King Lear’s Fool, for example, turns out to be the only adult in whom (because he is a "child"), an old, failing king at the mercy of his enemies can find any wisdom. It is the fool who presides over the old king's rebirth, and his reassumption of childhood. The child and the fool, as they are presented in wisdom discourse, stand for a crisis in the human understanding of self in its relation to whole, or cosmos. Historically, this crisis occurred in the Greek and Hellenistic world, where both the Near Eastern wisdom-as-technical knowledge tradition which had one culmination in the sophists, and its close relative, the even older Egyptian wisdom-as-harmony-with-cosmos tradition which culminated in Stoicism, fell to the radical Socratic aporia. This paper seeks to identify the psychological and epistemological moment at which the child and the Fool become powerful, if enigmatic, signs of the hidden wisdom for the Western tradition, and significant symbols for the mythic structure of Western self-understanding.

Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 1993

We demonstrate the alignment of the resonances in multimode photonic crystal cavities and discuss... more We demonstrate the alignment of the resonances in multimode photonic crystal cavities and discuss implications for ultra-efficient parametric interactions and generation of non-classical light.

Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 1990

Like the fool for the king, the young child represents for the adult original human nature in all... more Like the fool for the king, the young child represents for the adult original human nature in all its ambiguity and ambivalence. The child's nature, like the fool's, is both fallen and innocent, amoral and beyond morality--and what is even more confusing, alternately one or the other. The child's unsocialized presence reveals and exposes the imperfections of the socialized world of adult artifice and hypocrisy. The child's very simplicity seems perverse by reason of the corruption of the adults who so judge him or her.The child is a question put to the adult world, a pretext for a radical re-evaluation of the question of what it means to be human. Like the fool's babble, the child's very being is presented to us as a riddle, an enigma. In learning the language and the moves of philosophy, we render, if only through a sort of displacement, the inarticulate discourse of the fool and the child into adult speech. Philosophy itself does not speak the "prelapsarian tongue," but it is propedeutic to it, in that it has a way of breaking the frames of the adult common sense world, of casting that world into doubt, on the assumption that in so doing, some deeper or better knowledge of the world will emerge. And that better, deeper knowledge is, at least in some part, the knowledge of the child and of the fool.

Philosophy Philosophy Are You there? Doing Philosophy with Children, 2013

The collection of papers in this volume is riddled with questions. Perhaps the most plangent and ... more The collection of papers in this volume is riddled with questions. Perhaps the most
plangent and suggestive is the one that provides its title: “Philosophy philosophy are you there?”
The question evokes a ritual refrain in a childhood game and, as in those particular ones we
loved to play outside as a summer night was beginning to fall, the playful representation of loss,
displacement, visibility and invisibility, mystery, uncertainty and thrill—the grand, ambiguous
narrative of desire. Maybe the title also indirectly references the “end of philosophy” in a global
order that is intent, not so much on repressing the philosophical response among the economic
units to which it reduces human persons, as in reterritorializing that response such that it does not
even threaten to interfere with the calculus of cost-benefit analysis and the profit motive. Has
philosophy slipped away, gone amnesiac in the gridlocked streets of globalized
economic/political corruption, the “control society,” permanent war and the politics of
polarization? Has it been abducted or gone delusional? Has it, in order to avoid an even worse
fate, disguised itself as something else—“critical thinking,” “citizenship skills and dispositions,”
cognitive and moral “competencies,” “reasonableness” and so on? Or has it just gone invisible—
slipped on the Ring of Gyges--or dispersed, shed its form, and now inhabits the negative space
between us, the necessary but unsaid or unsayable? What is philosophy? As one of the authors in
this volume asks, what are its boundaries and where are its beginnings? Philosophy philosophy,
are you there?

Chapter in D. Kennedy, "A comunidade da infância", 2020

Este texto foi escrito por um duplo corpo-máquina, afetado pelos mistérios evocados por Incêndios... more Este texto foi escrito por um duplo corpo-máquina, afetado pelos mistérios evocados por Incêndios, filme canadense escrito e dirigido por Denis Villeneuve, adaptado da peça de mesmo título do libanês Wajdi Mouawad. No início de Incêndios-como um enigma que vai atravessar a escura e serena paisagem dramática do filme-nos é dito que: "A infância é uma faca presa na garganta. Ela não pode ser facilmente removida". Este ensaio é uma tentativa de desdobrar algumas das possíveis hipóteses e inferências que se escondem nesta declaração, e rastreá-las através do labirinto de Creta dos paradoxos, reversões e aporias da história. Nossa guia será a noção de infantia de J.-F. Lyotard, a partir da qual esperamos oferecer uma linha heurística até o santuário monstruoso do arquétipo Minotauro; apreciando, assim, uma das possíveis leituras das dimensões estéticas e políticas do filme. A INFÂNCIA COMO UMA FACA NA GARGANTA A primeira parte da mencionada declaração de abertura do filme poderia invocar a imagem da infância como uma ferida que é infligida à própria vida adulta-e não apenas uma ferida, mas uma ferida que nunca vai cicatrizar, ou, se atentarmos à segunda parte da declaração, que não vai cicatrizar até que a própria infância, com dificuldade (isto é, por meio de um trabalhoso processo envolvendo algum tipo de viagem da memória), seja removida. Nossa tentativa é ir um pouco mais longe, atrás ou antes, um atrás e um antes que não são tópicos nem cronológicos, mas ontológicos. Nas palavras de J.-F. Lyotard, nossa tentativa é passar da infância à infantia, aquele primeiro movimento anterior a qualquer movimento humano, aquele primeiro nascimento antes de nascer na terra. No caso do filme, a remoção requer encontrar o terror sublime e numinoso de nossas origens quase míticas e, por implicação, as origens profundas do que constitui cada um de nós, expressado na terminologia freudiana como o mito de Édipo, a diferença sexual, a castração da mãe, o tabu do incesto, a sexualidade pré-genital, ou nas associações antigas de incesto com os deuses e as figuras semidivinas, como em práticas antigas da realeza, ou qualquer outra fórmula que se refira a esse primeiro golpe, antes que passemos a ser nós mesmos.