Philosophy for/with Children (P4wC) is a pedagogical practice that aims to enhance thinking skills through group dialogue. One way it achieves this goal is by providing exposure to arguments. In a philosophical group dialogue, participants encounter, examine, or construct arguments. These arguments not only emerge spontaneously during discussions…

Jason Taylor aims in this article to establish two related claims: first, that the features of games provide fertile grounds on which long term philosophical engagement can be fostered; and second, that the attitude of playfulness is a happy bedfellow for the attitude and dispositions that dialogical inquiry is designed to foster in both…

Since the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) originated the idea of a 'community of inquiry' to describe and promote the norms of scientific inquiry, that idea has been used to characterize a wide variety of educational programs, academic disciplines, and institutional, governmental, and political practices. Those who do…

Cinema has become indispensable to the world since the Lumiere Brothers shot the first film in the history of cinema, "Arrival of a Train." While it promised a captivating experience for audiences, those in power sought ways to exploit cinema and found it relatively easy to do so. Even Hitler sought refuge in cinema during the 1936…

As the story is often told, P4C was established after Matthew Lipman, then a professor of education at Columbia University, observed a deficiency in reasoning skills among his students and colleagues during the student protest of April 1968. Lipman pondered whether there might be a way to enhance the critical thinking skills of individuals through…

A common response from teachers when involved for the first time with the P4C program is related to their lack of background in philosophy. In the current use of the P4C educational approach, most, if not all teacher guides --those who offer training courses to other teachers in preparing them to facilitate philosophical inquiry in their…

This article focuses on philosophy with children aiming to address the epistemic injustices that children encounter, in part by cultivating philosophical spaces within which children's voices are dominant. In philosophical dialogues with children, it is the children's ideas and questions that shape the progress of the inquiry, opening up new areas…

Dialogue combines the Greek dia ("across") with logos ("word" or "speech") to mean a mutual exchange of meaning across space and time. A dialogue involves two or more entities in communication with each other, taking turns in some physical or conceptual space that separates and distinguishes these entities. The…

Freedom is a magnet. Ask any teen chomping at the bit under adult rules. Ask any entrepreneur entangled in endless government regulation. Ask any child in a war zone who longs for freedom from fear. This "will to freedom" is an appetitive stimulus for us all; a stimulus more foundational than the "will to power" (Nietzsche…

The literature on U.S. Americanization in Puerto Rico's public schools suggests that "de jure" U.S. Americanization culminated in 1949 when an administrative order made Spanish the official language of instruction. However, the same literature seems to indicate that students continue to experience the impacts of U.S. Americanization…

Many Philosophy for Children (P4C) practitioners in different parts of the world have recognized the need for contextually relevant texts and created new stories and other materials to use as starting points for inquiry, some more sophisticated and comprehensive than others. P4C (Philosophy for Children) stands for the name of the comprehensive…

There is a new "genre" of literature that is aimed explicitly at adults and children, or sometimes simply at adults, which follow the formula of the picture book: the inclusion of a simple text accompanying provocative images, and sometimes images alone. On the surface they may seem best suited for the "children's section" of a…

One of the oldest criticisms against 'Philosophy for Children' has been that children are too young to engage in abstractions, critical thinking and logic. And indeed, P4C has often been reduced to a critical thinking program where logic is at the forefront of competence development. Thus, when we are trying to address the question whether or not…

This article argues that since Piaget, many advancements have been made in psychological studies about reasoning. Even though some parts of his theory are still very helpful to understanding the development of rationality, it is a mistake to view children as illogical beings. On the contrary, they happen to be logical at a very young age, as the…

Descartes compared philosophy to a tree: "Thus, all Philosophy is like a tree, of which Metaphysics is the root, Physics the trunk, and all the other sciences the branches that grow out of this trunk, which are reduced to three principal, namely, Medicine, Mechanics, and Ethics. By the science of Morals, I understand the highest and most…