The journal was a forum for the work of both theorists and practitioners of philosophical practice with children, and published such work in all forms, including philosophical argument and reflection, classroom transcripts, curricula, empirical research, and reports from the field. The journal also maintained a tradition in publishing articles in the hermeneutics of childhood, a field of intersecting disciplines including cultural studies, social history, philosophy, art, literature and psychoanalysis.
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Philosophy is an elective subject in secondary education in the Netherlands, which is not often studied in the context of citizenship education. This is probably because only a minority of students participate in philosophy classes in the upper grades of secondary education (approximately 2-5% of all students). However, especially in the years 2022-2025 philosophy is particularly interesting for those studying how citizenship education can be taught, because the higher general track students study a range of philosophical ideas about democracy for their final exams (Spoelstra et al., 2021).This paper presents a qualitative analysis of three philosophy classes about freedom of speech. The lesson transcripts, pre- and post-observation interviews with 3 teachers and 15 students (5 from each class) are coded thematically with a framework for four teacher responsibilities during philosophical discussion in moral education. These four responsibilities are: teachers have an organizational responsibility to facilitate lesson activities such as classroom dialogue to facilitate thinking about democracy, an epistemic responsibility to warrant valid reasoning and recognition of established facts during the lesson, a pedagogic responsibility to create a safe and open classroom climate and a moral responsibility to find the right balance between value communication and stimulation (Leenders & Veugelers, 2004; Rombout et al., 2022; Sprod, 2001). The main research question was: how do philosophy teachers realize these four responsibilities to facilitate their students’ thinking about democracy in a lesson about freedom of speech and how to teacher and students evaluate these responsibilities in this lesson?The findings contain rich descriptions of lesson activities such as considering borderline cases, facilitating teacher-led dialogue, organizing debate, and learning about philosophers’ arguments. These are supplemented with reflections of the participants on teacher neutrality and how open and safe the classroom climate was during these lessons.
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The topic of this paper is the constructivism-realism debate, construed as an example of the intrusion of philosophy into science. Against this intrusion I maintain that philosophical problems are not only different from scientific and practical ones. They are also problematic in themselves. That is why their import into our scientific and practical work only creates confusions that hinder us in our work. The aim of the paper is to show that the philosophical problems that create those confusions need a Wittgensteinian therapeutic treatment. The method of the paper consists in comparing what philosophers (or philosophising scientists) say we do with what we actually do. After giving an example of what happens when a rightly respected scientist starts philosophizing, the method is applied, first, to the relation between language and the world and, second, to the relation between theories and the world. In the first application a story about three umpires is used to distinguish language and discourse, between questions of meaning (of the words we use) and questions of truth (of the things we say). In the second application a comparison between maps and theories is used to show the difference between assessing the truth of descriptive statements and explanatory theories. The examples of the umpires and maps are introduced by Weick and in both cases I show that neither constructivist nor metaphysical realist conclusions follow.
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In secondary school philosophy classes students learn to reason critically about social and scientific issues. This study examined the effects of a whole-class, teacher-led philosophy classroom dialogue intervention on students’ value-loaded critical thinking. Value-loaded critical thinking is logically consistent, self-reflective reasoning focused on making moral value-judgments about what is right to believe or do. In a quasi-experimental study (N = 437 students) with a pre-test post-test design, we investigated whether engaging in classroom dialogues in which the teachers implemented five design principles for promoting value-loaded critical thinking and transfer thereof, positively affected students’ (n = 150) value-loaded critical thinking in transfer tasks. The results were compared to two comparison conditions: students (n = 149) who participated in regular teacher-led philosophy classroom dialogues and students (n = 145) who followed a regular 10th-grade curriculum without philosophy classes. Results showed that students in the intervention condition outperformed students in both comparison conditions on referring to moral values. Regarding critical reasoning, we only found significant effects compared to the students who followed the regular 10th-grade curriculum. Findings indicate that a specifically designed dialogic intervention can enhance students’ capacities in value-loaded critical thinking.
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Over the last five years, I have found myself circling around four key concepts: Performance. Philosophy. Animals. And Equality. And I have found myself thinking in and with circles. It began with the various references to circles we can find in the philosophy of Henri Bergson - in his idea of the field of attention as the distance between the two points of a compass (Bergson 2014); in his imagining of an expansive centrifugal movement that might turn a closed society into an open one (Bergson 2002); and in the role he gives to embodied practice to ‘break the circle’ of the given in which rationality or only an intellectualised notion of what counts as thought traps us (Bergson 1911). I found the circle again in the so-called ‘non-philosophy’ of Francois Laruelle (2011) – in his critique of the vicious circles and circular arguments of standard philosophies of art - including dance. But I also found the circle of anthropocentrism. I found the circle at the circus - a circle that calls upon us to consider all that goes on behind the scenes in order to produce performing animals anthropocentrically. I began to consider what role performance could play in displacing the human from the centre of values through a process of animalisation. Consider philosophy an expanding circle. Consider performance an expanding circle. The etymology of the English word centre (n.) – comes from the Latin centrum, originally the fixed point of the two points of a drafting compass, and from the Greek kentron meaning “sharp point, goad, sting of a wasp”. The centre is a middle point of a circle: the point around which something revolves. But the centre is also pointed and sharp – that which goads moving bodies in a particular direction. The goad is a traditional farming implement: a spiked stick used to spur or guide livestock; for instance, to round up cattle. The elephant goad or bullhook, is a tool employed in the training of elephants. It consists of a metal hook attached to a handle. The Greeks, we are told, used the phrase “kicking against the goad” as a proverb to teach us of the foolishness of resistance against a powerful authority: those who place themselves at the centre. The underlying ontology that informs all this work can be summed up in the words of Octavia Butler: All that you touch. You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. (To which we might add the footnote that truth itself changes) (Butler 1993: 3). How to think alongside dance or movement as change - understood via Bergson (amongst others) as alteration or qualitative becoming (rather than spatial transition); how to think alongside the world as movement, as change; how to dance the thought of change as a changing thought…? These are my recurring questions. The questions that keep circling back to me and through me. In this text, I will rehearse a thinking that dances the relations between performance, philosophy, animals and equality according to the figure of the circle. To think with dance and dance with thought in relation to nonhuman animals and the question of equality – understood as an ontological, epistemological, aesthetic, political and ethical question. Equality (and inequality) is a matter of how to think the fundamental nature of and relations between dance, thought, and interspecies being as our so-called ‘objects’ of enquiry. Especially within philosophies of immanence – there is an appeal to the equality of the Real, to an evenness or levelling of what is beyond hierarchized binaries between mind and body; matter and spirit; this world and some transcendent realm. Equality is a question for knowledge itself: the critique of authority and the pursuit of equality within knowledge-production; and to the hierarchies between ways of knowing. Equality is an issue for arts and more widely for aesthetic experience: who is making art for whom and from what point of view, whose aesthetic interests are taken into account and how is experience ordered to centre and give priority to some over others. Equality is linked to paying attention, to how attention is distributed and how it can be practiced in more or less exclusive and expansive ways. And of course, equality is a fundamental subject for politics and ethics. Let’s do this dance together. Step by step. Step 1: from the application of philosophy to the Real, to the emergence of philosophy from it. Step 2: from the application of philosophy to performance, to the practice of a performance philosophy. Step 3: from the judgment of animal capabilities according to human standards for what counts as ‘proper’ performance and philosophy to ‘animal performance philosophy’ as the animalization of performance and philosophy. Step 4: from the application of a universalized notion of the standard human to denigrate both human and nonhuman animals to a solidarity based on attending to the shared logic of speciesism, racism and ableism. Step 5: Towards radical equality as a performative praxis of thought. And yet, we cannot move towards equality ‘step by step’. We cannot move towards equality step by step because there can be no step-by-step guide to what it means to practice it in a given context. ‘Openness is a necessarily vague formulation that requires continual creativity to fill out its content in any one situation; one should see it as a moving position with no essence’ (Mullarkey 2012: 70). And we cannot move towards equality step by step, because it’s all or nothing. As Etienne Balibar says: Equality in fact cannot be limited. Once some X’s (“men”) are not equal, the predicate of equality can no longer be applied to anyone, for all those to whom it is supposed to be applicable are in fact “superior”, “dominant”, “privileged”, etc. Enjoyment of the equality of rights cannot spread step by step, beginning with two individuals and gradually extending to all: it must immediately concern the universality of individuals…This explains… the antinomy of equality and society for, even when it is not defined in “cultural”. “national”, or “historical” terms, a society is necessarily a society, defined by some particularity, by some exclusion, if only by a name (Balibar 2016: np). Equality will always remain exclusive if it moves step by step – expanding the circle of equality or ethical consideration to previously ostracized groups. Such a dance of thought also fails to understand the actuality of intersectional identities and interdependence. And for sure we will not reach radical equality with reasoning or intellectual exertion. As John Mullarkey suggests: ‘We can only understand equality through a performative thought, a movement or vital action rather than an intellectualist representation of it’ (Mullarkey 2012: 63). To which I might add: We do not need a philosophy of radical equality, we need to practice radical equality as a performance philosophy. Or again, the only way we can develop our understanding of radical equality is through its performative praxis. This is not going to be easy or simple. We are going to make mistakes, we are going to fall flat on our faces. Perhaps, following choreographer Amanda Piña, we should not call this a performance but a rehearsal (Piña 2017)1). So, there can be circles we want to dance as well as those we want to escape. But for the most part here our focus will be on the movements and practices that break or escape circles – whether in terms of methods that allow us to break out of the circularities of traditional philosophical analysis; or the practices that break open the circle of the “we” who are equal as always constituted through exclusion. In contrast, what we are speculatively choreographing – alongside Bergson and performance - is a movement of opening to openness (Mullarkey 2012: 69)2). In this particular rehearsal of work-in-progress thinking, my concern is with intersectional, interspecies performative praxis as a means to break out of the circularity of thought when it is reduced to a universalizing, anthropocentric and ableist intellectualism with the white, male, non-disabled subject of reason as the centre of values. My larger project is concerned with how the relationships between performance and philosophy, humans and nonhuman animals are performatively enacted and with how we can move towards what we might describe as a ‘radical equality in thought’ rather than remaining trapped in the circularity of a philosophy of performance, an anthropocentric model of performance, and a universalizing approach to animal performance philosophy. This text is in three parts.
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“Municipal Youth Work taken over by Christians”. (Binnenlands Bestuur, 2009) This heading refers to the work of Youth for Christ in an Amsterdam neighbourhood. This organisation, successful in Youth Work nationwide, last year came out first in an open competition of the Amsterdam district De Baarsjes. Because of this they were commissioned to undertake all the youth work in this multicultural neighbourhood. The conditions were not to evangelise and not to limit recruitment of personnel inside their own circle but to recruit from outside the organisation as well. When they later appeared to have put a job advertisement only on their own website, this led to heated debates. Finally Youth for Christ acknowledged and rectified this mistake. This example is a concrete illustration of the actual and sometimes delicate relationships between philosophy of life and social work
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Philosophy for Democracy is a research project that aims to examine whether and how Philosophy with Children contributes to the development of democratic skills and attitudes. In the Netherlands, as in almost all Western countries, Philosophy with Children is linked with the movement for citizenship education. This article reports the research on the practice of Philosophy with Children. Sixteen philosophical inquiries by children in the classroom were recorded, transcribed and analysed. The analyses show that children develop relevant reasoning skills and advanced dialogical skills. The study shows that embedding Philosophy with Children in a democratic practice is necessary for contributing to a critical-democratic citizenship development. The study also shows that Dutch children often give their opinion, but are not often involved in inquiring their own opinions. From a pedagogical point of view, we think that in Dutch culture and in Dutch schools it would be important to stress more a dialogical – community-based – inquiring attitude. Om het artikel te lezen moet het gekocht worden: http://tandfonline.com/eprint/rGysRMaKEaXew7veJphB/full
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Value-loaded critical thinking refers to a combination of critical thinking, moral value development and reflection. It is important to teach value-loaded critical thinking in secondary education and philosophy seems the pre-eminent subject to do so. This article describes the theoretical foundations of value-loaded critical thinking, its educational objectives, and what is known about effective teaching strategies. Value-loaded critical thinking is best taught in teacher-led philosophical dialogues. Four design principles summarize effective teaching strategies for teaching value-loaded critical thinking in dialogue: teachers should (1) explicitly address moral values in dialogue; (2) apply moral values to engaging or realistic examples; (3) promote critical reasoning about moral values; and (4) provide opportunities for reflection.It is important that secondary school students learn to reason critically about normative issues. Philosophy teachers can contribute to this educational objective by promoting value-loaded critical thinking during philosophical dialogues. Value-loaded critical thinking is critical and reflective reasoning focused on deciding what is the right thing to believe or to do (Frijters et al. 2008). This paper describes the theoretical foundations of value-loaded critical thinking and presents four design principles for promoting value-loaded critical thinking during philosophical dialogues. The four design principles are: teachers should explicitly address moral values in dialogue (1), apply moral values to engaging or realistic examples (2), promote critical reasoning about moral values (3), and provide opportunities for reflection (4). To provide authentic illustrations and practical suggestions for teachers, each design principle includes selected excerpts of classroom dialogues of 10th grade philosophy classes in Dutch.
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In this paper we explore how the collaboration between Design Research and Philosophy of technology can be profitable for both disciplines. From three case studies where Philosophy of Technology theories and methods were applied in a design context we show how these projects profited from a more reflexive perspective. Then we analyse the three cases again to show how these design projects also lead to a better understanding from a Philosophy of Technology perspective. In putting the in principle rather abstract theories in design practice, the consequences become clearer and designing actual things thus provides a laboratory to test philosophical frameworks in real life. One can say that the Philosophy of Technology, besides thinking and talking, proceeds to action. Not only Philosophy of Technology with the head, but also Philosophy of Technology with the hands. Therefore, in analogy with the empirical turn in Philosophy of Technology before, we present this collaboration with design as the ‘Practical Turn in Philosophy of Technology’. In: Proceedings of DRS 2018: Design as a catalyst for change (Vol. I, pp. 190-200)
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Philosophy can benefit from experiments performed in a laboratory for philosophical experimentation (SophoLab). To illustrate the power of Experimental Computational Philosophy, we set up and ran several experiments on a part of Harsanyi's theory on utilitarianism. Then it became clear that his theory is underspecified. We filled in the blank spots and discovered that information and its costs are key in the effectiveness of act and rule utilitarianism. We also identified three further elements that have particular influence on the effectiveness of both strands of utilitarianism: group size of agents, decision-making around uncertainty, and social culture towards particular types of actions.
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