Analytic teaching and Philosophical praxis


ANALYTIC TEACHING AND PHILOSOPHICAL PRAXIS Volume 40, Issue 1 (2020) 

 

Guest Editor’s Welcome 
     As my fellow veterans will attest to, there are escalating challenges that come 
with the piling on of years. So, it is with genuine exuberance when I say that 
working with this lovely group of international veterans has been genuine 
pleasure.  
     The first article by Laurance Splitter (Australia) entitled “Reflecting and 
Looking Forward: Inquiring into Inquiry, Philosophy and Community” engages 
the reader in “a meta-level inquiry into the nature of inquiry” in which, (amongst 
other intriguing moves) the dichotomy between teaching to instill “stuff” (as 
opposed to not) is repudiated, the necessary conditions of inquiry are explored 
(e.g., Is it important for the teacher not to know the answer?), as are the 
dispositions that are critical for genuine inquiry, the danger of certainty, and the 
role that professional philosophy plays or ought to play in this entire endeavor.  
     The second article by Claire Cassidy (England) and Jana Mohr Lone (US) 
entitled “Thinking about Childhood: Being and Becoming in the World” focuses 
on the focus of P4/wC, namely the child, or more particularly, the potentially 
problematic perception of the child from the perspective of the adult or, indeed, 
from the perspective of the child. It is argued here that, if we hope to help children 
maximize their potential, we must keep in mind how this potentially problematic 
view of childhood may limit children’s confidence, their imagination, their 
thinking, and their ability to genuinely participate in philosophical dialogue. 
    The third article by Maura Striano (Italy) entitled “The Deweyan Background 
in P4C,” will reinvigorate the reader’s detailed understanding of the Deweyan 
theoretical underpinnings of the Community of Philosophical Inquiry (COPI), as 
well as remind us of what a herculean move the founder of P4/WC, Matthew 
Lipman made when he insisted that we do our youngsters an unforgivable 
disservice if we over-focus on knowledge transmission and, in the process, fail to 
educate them for thinking. 
     The forth article by Larisa Retyunskikh (Russia) entitled “Teaching Philosophy 
and Doing Philosophy in The Space of Play” makes the case that “doing 
philosophy” ought always to be part of “teaching philosophy,” and that this most 
certainly can be done in a way that is playful. The case is also made for using 
classical philosophical texts as the stimuli for such philosophizing, as opposed to, 
say, the original IAPC novels that hide the message of classical texts in fictional 
narratives. 
     The fifth article by Richard (Mort) Morehouse (US) entitled “Doing 
Philosophical Psychology: Helping Adolescents Discover their Place in History,” 
presents an intriguing, almost heart-wrenching, case for the importance of 
adopting educational strategies (which Morehouse demonstrates as happening in 
a university-level psychology class using an adapted form of the CPI) that will assist 
adolescents not only to learn how to answer the question “Who am I,” but to 
recognize the importance of reflecting upon what kinds of actions, attitudes, and 
judgments are necessary so that there is an entity to whom they 
can address that question.  
   The sixth article entitled “What Kind of Magnet Is Freedom?” (mine, Canada) 
argues that, since an increase in the freedom of individual choice inevitably 
decreases freedom somewhere else in the social net (thus requiring unending 
judicial balancing), autonomy, in the sense of the freedom to pull away from the 
force of extrinsic-freedom magnets, ought to be a pivotal educational goal. 

           

CHIEF EDITOR 

Jason J. Howard 

Viterbo University 

 

WEB PAGE MASTER 

Jason Skoog 

Viterbo University 

 

COPY EDITOR 

Jason J. Howard 

Viterbo University 

 

EDITORIAL BOARD 

Sara Cook 

Viterbo University 

 

Susan Gardner 

Capilano University 

 

Susan Hughes 

Viterbo University 

 

David Kennedy 

Montclair State University 

 

Nadia S. Kennedy 

Stony Brook University, SUNY 

 

Richard Morehouse, Emeritus 

Viterbo University 

 

Félix García Moriyón 

Center for Philosophy for Children, 

Madrid, Spain 

 

Joe Oyler 

Maynooth University, Kildare, 

Ireland 

 

Barbara Weber 

University of British Columbia 

 

PUBLISHER 
Viterbo University, La Crosse, Wisconsin 

45601 

Established in 1981 as Analytic Teaching 

at Texas Wesleyan College and 

transferred to Viterbo in 1993. 

Online Copyright 2005. 

Analytic Teaching and Philosophical 

Praxis is a peer-reviewed, online, open 

access journal published annually and 

sometimes biannually. ISSN 2374-8257