1st Global Conference
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Friday 10th September - Sunday 12th September 2004
Mansfield College, Oxford
Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers
Session
3: Children and Philosophical Games
Chair: Joseph Dunne
Children, Games and Philosophy: Family Club “Socrates School” in Moscow
Larisa Retyunskikh
President of Interregional Children's Fund "Philosophy for Children" and
Department
of Philosophy Moscow Pedagogical State University, Moscow, Russia
My methodical program of “Philosophical games for children and adults” has been around for more than 10 years now and has been successfully implemented in several schools and cultural centres of Russia and Ukraine . It is based on the premise that each child is a spontaneous philosopher. Following are some of the examples of children’ statements, given in my last book (Moscow 2003):
Anastasia Apostolova (9 years old): “Freedom is when a man can live his own life, express his own thoughts”
Ksenia Moskvicheva (11 years): “Freedom is a feeling of absolute control over yourself”.
Serguei Kotov (14 years): “Mind is the ability of a man not to repeat his mistake more than two times. The first time man understands he made a mistake, the second time he understands not to repeat it again”.
My concept differs from widely known program “Philosophy
for the children” by M. Lipman. Philosophy, in my view, contains
not only intellectual, but also huge moral potential; therefore,
the task of thought development with the help of the philosophy isn’t
the only one. Perhaps, even more important result of early familiarizing
with philosophy should be considered expansion of possibilities and
intensity of molding moral consciousness, value orientations of
personality. My procedure is directed not as much towards the formation
of cognitive habits, but for the stimulation of conscious moral search,
selection of the living sense orientations, etc.
My programme presents
itself in a form of leisure, specifically, family
leisure. By all means the most important condition for participation
in our games is the presence of family members (parents and children
alike).
The GAME, therefore, forms the basis of the proposed method. The key
principles of the proposed method are:
Principle of dialogic is based
on maieutics (method of Socrates)
and is meant to activate cognitive process, stimulate its development
with the help of specially arranged conversation.
Reliance on primary
sources of information makes an easy introduction to salient philosophical
studies possible, as participants are presented not with adapted material,
but with excerpts from original philosophical texts of all times.
The
principle of creative problem-solving is realized through the process
of task development, which requires not the demonstration
of one’s erudition, bur rather the independent analysis,
one’s own understanding of a problem; it includes the principle
of improvised creativity, which assumes the construction of tasks in
such a way that they would stimulate the tendency toward improvised
self expression, which in turn increases the emotional fullness of
the very event of “game”.
Game has specific rules, which
can change depending on the audience.
Wittgenstein’s Children and Children’s
Philosophy
Megan Laverty Educational
Foundations, Montclair State University, New Jersey, USA
I draw on Wittgensteinian moral philosophy to defend the practice of engaging children in philosophical inquiry on the grounds that such engagement acknowledges, instantiates and cultivates children’s participation in the ethical community. Wittgenstein does not directly address the question of whether children can, or indeed, should do philosophy, but the evidence suggests that he conceived of ‘being philosophical’ as something that one becomes by virtue of one’s apprenticeship in the practice of philosophy, the character of which determines its lack of availability to children. That this is the case is supported by the views of contemporary Wittgensteinian philosophers, Paul Standish and Raimond Gaita, who are both skeptical about the possibility of philosophy with children. Each represents philosophy as an intellectually and morally rigorous engagement with questions of fundamental importance, internal to which, is an understanding of the profound significance and seriousness of such engagement. For this, the individual requires both a depth of life experience and a profound regard for the philosophical tradition—hence the necessity of an apprenticeship as noted above. My purpose in this paper, however, is to suggest that there is nothing essentially Wittgensteinian about this conception of philosophy. We can infer from Wittgenstein’s family resemblances argument a pluralistic conception of philosophy that would include a conception of philosophy as closer to ordinary reflection and so permit its practice with children. Further, I will argue that such a conception of philosophy makes it ethically imperative to engage children in philosophical reflection so as to acknowledge and improve how it is that they labour under the requirement to live meaningfully. I shall conclude by suggesting that philosophical dialogue is an important means by which adults can bring children into the shared practices of ethical community.
Shura Tarnopolskaya
Ukraine
No abstract is presently available