Philosophy Commons^™

Dead Bird (1965/2016) By Margaret Wise Brown, Peter Shea

Picture Books

Children come upon a bird that has just died. It is still warm. They bury it, sing a song they have made up, and plant flowers. They visit the grave every day to put fresh flowers on it and to sing to the bird, until they forget. Margaret Wise Brown’s The Dead Bird is a story about how a new ritual happens, spontaneously, out of a shared experience of grief, expressing a shared reverence for one kind of life. The children are thinking, in a way: they are keeping something in mind for a long time, in a beautiful form. …

Mis Dos Pueblos Fronterizos / My Two Border Towns (2021) By David Bowles, Amy Reed-Sandoval

Picture Books

When children talk about migration and displacement, they generally speak and inquire about people. Why are some people forced to leave their homes—or why was I forced to leave my home? Why won’t other countries let them in—or why won’t other countries let my family and me in? What does it feel like to live in a shelter, or in a refugee camp, or on a bridge between two countries—or why must my family live this way, while others do not? This picture book shows how philosophical questions about migration can be inspired by, and embedded in, communities and characters …

Charles Peirce And The Community Of Philosophical Inquiry, Maughn Rollins Gregory

Department of Educational Foundations Scholarship and Creative Works

Introduction: "We individually cannot reasonably hope to attain the ultimate philosophy which we pursue; we can only seek it, therefore, for the community of philosophers." Charles S.Peirce, 1868 (5.265).

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. The first purpose of this essay is to establish that the precise phrase ‘community of inquiry’—which does not occur in Peirce’s writings—was coined in 1978 …

Anne Frank: The Diary Of A Young Girl (1947/1991) By Anne Frank, Alona Kharina

Young Adult Books

We can take Anne Frank’s book as an example of the accumulation and release of the trauma caused by adverse events, through conversation with ourselves, our shadow side. We can also take it as an example of forgiveness. It is possible for us, as readers, to witness life in a meager room during the war, without any external contacts. We observe Anne’s mental maturation and hear testimonies of unfriendly love for her mother and painful love for her father. Her memoir is an opportunity to explore issues of morality, faith, hope, and freedom, through the prism of the tragic experiences …

Vovchyk Who Rode A Bomb (2019) By Yuri Nikitinsky, Hanna Klymenko-Syniook

Middle Grades Books

Today some people have been denied the feeling of safety; others have lost their families, homes, and even the towns, and villages of their local homeland. Many now find themselves in occupied towns, and many more have been forced to move into the unknown, in search of the refuge provided by relatively safe regions, or abroad. And how many have been compelled to escape a second time to save their children? In the humorous and tragic story “Vovchyk who rode a bomb” and the philosophical adventure story “If Bodya were here,” Nikitinsky depicts war as it is seen by children, …

(2022) ​​Philosophy For Children As A Form Of Spiritual Education, Olivier Michaud

Collected Papers of Maughn Rollins Gregory

In the last two decades, some authors in the philosophy for children movement have theorized that the community of philosophical inquiry can be a form of spiritual practice, of the care of the self, or a wisdom practice (De Marzio, 2009; Gregory, 2009, 2013, 2014;Gregory & Laverty, 2009). Yet, it is unclear if philosophy for children is, by itself, a form of spiritual education, or if it requires some sorts of modification to be one. And, if it is or can be a form of spiritual education, we can interrogate in what ways and to what extent is it one. …

(2022) Philosophizing With Children’S Literature: A Response To Turgeon And Wartenberg, Darren Chetty, Maughn Rollins Gregory, Megan Jane Laverty

Collected Papers of Maughn Rollins Gregory

With the maturation of a field comes the opportunity and the responsibility to reflect on its sources, its areas and directions of development, debates among its proponents, and critiques originating from inside and outside the field. While early proponents of philosophy for children supported each other in the face of misunderstanding and misapprehension, differences inevitably arose among them, not only concerning materials and methods, but also concerning the very meanings of philosophy, childhood and education. These differences remain among contemporary scholars, educators and practitioners, who continue to engage in robust debates about how to research and practice philosophy with children …

How War Changed Rondo (2021) By Romana Romanyshyn And Andriy Lesiv, Maughn Rollins Gregory

Picture Books

In this evocative picture book, ‘War’ is a proper name, referring not to an event but to a malevolent being, depicted as a gigantic, shape-shifting amalgamation of buildings, war machines, and a mechanical human arm from which emerge tanks with eyes and jagged mouths, mosquito-like helicopters, and other “terrible clinking and hissing machines.” Nor does War seem to have any goal or intention other than indiscriminate destruction. These images raise a number of important questions about the nature of large- and small-scale violence. Who-all is responsible? If war requires the participation of many people, how does that happen? Have you …

Story Boat (2020) By Kyo Maclear, Samantha Piede

Picture Books

When the protagonist in Kyo Maclear’s Story Boat (2020) opens the book with “Here we are,” it is unclear to readers where exactly “here” might be. When safety must take precedence over familiarity, one develops a fleeting relationship with place. It is tempting, in stories like these, to emphasize the pain of the refugee experience: the uncertainty, the loss of one’s ‘heres’. But Maclear takes a different tack, giving readers the tools to focus on hope and wonder. Teachers may prompt students, in light of the book, to reflect on what they think a ‘home’ or a ‘here’ feels like …

Silan’S Box [Το Κουτί Του Σιλάν] (2017) By Άλκηστη Χαλικιά [Alkistis Chalikia], Maria Papathanasiou

Picture Books

Silan is an eight-year-old boy who was forced to leave his country and live in a new homeland, in Greece. He lives in a refugee center where he goes to a new school but does not speak the same language as the other children. He carries a little box with him—so precious that he keeps it with him constantly and does not share its contents with anyone. The children ask him every day about the contents of the box and try to guess what his hidden treasure might be. They think of what they would shield in their own box …

(2025) Curriculum Vitae Of Leonard Harris, Leonard Harris

Collected Papers of Leonard Harris

No abstract provided.

(2021) The Story Circle As A Practice Of Democratic, Critical Inquiry, Natalie M. Fletcher, Maughn Rollins Gregory, Peter Shea, Ariel Sykes

Collected Papers of Maughn Rollins Gregory

The authors of this essay have been committed practitioners and teachers of Philosophy for Children in a variety of educational settings, from pre-schools through university doctoral programs and in adult community and religious education programs. The promotion of critical thinking has always been a primary goal of this movement. But communal practices of critical thinking need to include other kinds of democratic conversation that prompt us to see others as full-fledged persons and to be curious about howour being in community with them makes growth and self-correction possible. As we continue to experiment and innovate in new contexts we see …

(2014) Thirteen Reasons Why (2007) By Jay Asher, Peter Shea

Collected Papers of Peter Shea

Asher portrays plausibly the descent of a fragile person into disappointment, disillusionment, apathy, and despair. He describes clearly the process by which someone gives up on life. I cannot be sure that reading this book is safe for someone who has already started down that path. On the other hand, when I first read this book, I thought, "I must change my life. I must be more careful with people, especially people at the margins of my daily activities. I am more responsible than I generally notice." That seemed to me to be the core of what ethical thinking requires.

(2014) Dialogic Schooling, David K. Kennedy

Collected Papers of David Kennedy

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 …

(2012) "I Must Change My Life": A Review Of Mathew Lipman’S A Life Teaching Thinking, David K. Kennedy

Collected Papers of David Kennedy

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 …

Curriculum Vitae Of Gareth B. Matthews, Gareth B. Matthews

Collected Papers of Gareth B. Matthews

No abstract provided.

(2010) The View From Saturday (1996) By E.L. Konigsburg, Peter Shea

Collected Papers of Peter Shea

E.L. Konigsburg uses every word and detail in her book, The View from Saturday to provoke the reader into thinking. She is a monstrous optimist: she just expects that the reader, like her characters, enjoys thinking, is always looking for a puzzle or a problem, a thing to think about, in every corner of the world. A commentary on the necessary journeys of four children and their teacher, the novel challenges students and teachers to find the projects that will bring their own learning to life in this way. It’s a surprisingly successful strategy; one finds oneself trying to live …

(2010) Philosophical Dialogue With Children: Essays On Theory And Practice, David Kennedy

Collected Papers of David Kennedy

David Kennedy is the foremost expert of children’s philosophical experience and practice writing today. One of the factors that makes him so will be apparent to readers of this collection of essays: the insistent probing and the astonishing range of his scholarship, which encompasses philosophy of childhood, philosophy of education, developmental psychology, cultural studies, critical theory, philosophy of subjectivity, chaos and systems theory, epistemology, and metaphilosophy. The other factor, only hinted at in this book, is the thousands of hours that Kennedy has clocked on the rugs and in the small chairs of schools, pre-schools, churches and other children’s spaces …

(2009) The Invention Of Hugo Cabret: A Novel In Words And Pictures (2007) By Brian Selznick, Peter Shea

Collected Papers of Peter Shea

The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a demanding book, initiating the reader into a specific time and place, Paris in 1931, and into a set of unfamiliar ideas and metaphors. The young reader must learn his way around this world, and believe in it. I imagine a young child encountering this book, following its trail of pictures, making up a story, and then running up against a page of beautifully printed prose. The child will naturally ask, “What do these strange marks mean? How are they going to help me understand this story?” That question is an entry point into …

(2009) Caring For The “Self As One Among Others”, Laurance J. Splitter

Collected Papers of Laurance J. Splitter

n this paper, I explore some underpinnings of the community of inquiry (CoI), viewed as the primary mode of classroom organization in Philosophy for Children but also as a pedagogic, personal and inter-personal framework for teaching and learning in any subject area. I will argue that the CoI provides a model of both personal and intellectual development which exemplifies how classroom teaching and learning may be seen both as forms of care and of self-care.

(2008) The Higher Power Of Lucky (2006) By Susan Patron, Peter Shea

Collected Papers of Peter Shea

Ten-year-old Lucky lost her mother in a freak accident; her father is missing, and she is being cared for by her father’s former girlfriend in a tiny town at the edge of the Mojave desert. That could be the set-up for a story of loss and poverty. But this girl lives up to her name: she takes scraps of information, chance experiences, and overheard theories as resources for imagining the world and plotting her way forward. She learns how things work from the desert animals and insects, with the help of her hero, Charles Darwin. She learns survival and a …

Higher Power Of Lucky (2008) By Susan Patron, Maughn Gregory

Chapter Books

Ten-year-old Lucky lost her mother in a freak accident; her father is missing, and she is being cared for by her father’s former girlfriend in a tiny town at the edge of the Mojave desert. That could be the set-up for a story of loss and poverty. But this girl lives up to her name: she takes scraps of information, chance experiences, and overheard theories as resources for imagining the world and plotting her way forward. She learns how things work from the desert animals and insects, with the help of her hero, Charles Darwin. She learns survival and a …

(2006) The Pig In The Spigot (2000) By Richard Wilbur, Peter Shea

Collected Papers of Peter Shea

We can learn from our words, if we listen to them and play with them and see what they contain. That’s a lesson from the outer limits of philosophy, from Heidegger and Wittgenstein and Ricoeur. But the journey of listening to our own words can’t begin with these venerable giants. It has to start with fine springboard books like The Pig in the Spigot and with good games, played for life.

(2006) Philosophy In A Crowded Curriculum, Laurance J. Splitter

Collected Papers of Laurance J. Splitter

In this key-note Address presented at the Inaugural Conference on Philosophy in Schools held in Singapore in April 2006, Splitter argues that the focus on conceptual development and dialogue makes philosophy an important part of school curricula.

(2006) Changing Conceptions Of The Child From The Renaissance To Post-Modernity: A Philosophy Of Childhood, David Kennedy

Collected Papers of David Kennedy

In the eight essays that make up this volume David Kennedy offers provocative insights into what it means, has meant, and might mean in the future, to be a child. As we read him we feel the excitement of discovering truths that we want to think we knew all along. This book includes six essays on images of childhood and two extended reports on philosophical discussions he had with two groups of children. In each of those two reports on children’s thinking Kennedy interpolates his own reflections on the topics being discussed, on the methodology he is using, and on …

(2004) The Political And Social Ends Of Philosophy, Philip C. Guin

Collected Papers of Philip C. Guin

In this article, Guin responds to Walter Omar Kohan’s Presidential Address at the Tenth Conference of the International Council of Philosophy with Children, “Education, Philosophy, and Childhood: The Need to Think an Encounter” (published in Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children 16(1): 4-11, attached here), in which Kohan argues that “philosophy for children is not as transformative, as revolutionary, as radical, as it is needs to be in order to make any difference in these neo-capitalistic, global times.” Guin argues, contrarily, that the education in tools of inquiry, social solidarity, and interdependent thinking provided by philosophy for children is …

Offering A Frame To Put Experience In: Margaret Wise Brown Presents Ideas As Opportunities To Very Young Children, Peter Shea

Collected Papers of Peter Shea

In this essay I discuss Margaret Wise Brown’s picture books as tools for provoking philosophic reflection in young children and as meditations on the situation of the very young child and on the reflective work of the young child at a time when language is still new and fresh. Some of her work concerns the most fundamental negotiation in personal philosophy—the negotiation of an attitude to the outside world, to those realities beyond one's control, beyond one's zone of comfort.

03. Getting Our Thoughts Together: Instructional Manual To Accompany 'Elfie', Second Edition, Matthew Lipman

Early Elementary School Curriculum

The cognitive skills emphasized in Elfie – distinction-making and connection-making – are those on which all-subsequent reasoning rests. They are accompanied by the criteria that are appropriate to them: sameness and difference. Other operations like the making of comparisons, the discovery of uniformities, the identification of classes, the formation of concepts, and the formulation of definition, all depend upon the logical infrastructure of these two sets of skills and criteria. Elfie should therefore be seen as the base of the Philosophy for Children program.

20. Piksi (Slovenian Translation Of Pixie Novel), Matthew Lipman

Early Elementary School Curriculum

Piksi je osnovnošolka, ki je zmedena in navdušena nad številnimi vidiki svoje izkušnje. Ta roman poudarja odnose (logične, družbene, družinske, estetske, vzročne, del-celota, matematične itd.) kot tudi kompetenco pri obravnavanju takih odnosov. Etični koncepti vključujejo rivalstvo med sorojenci, osebnost, spoštovanje drugih, prijateljstvo, skrivnosti, držanje obljub, odnose med staršem in otrokom, poslušnost, draženje in avtonomijo.

Three Stories You Can Read To Your Cat (1997) By Sara Swan Miller, Gareth B. Matthews

Picture Books

When a cat's human friend leaves the house and tells it to be good, the cat does many things it considers good, like shredding the curtains, eating a house plant, and digging into the garbage. In this review, originally published in Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children 16(4), 2003, Gareth B. Matthews demonstrates that young children can understand and enjoy the irony of sarcasm. They also enjoy grappling with the story's philosophical irony: the problem of clarifying the difficult question of what makes an action good or bad.