The role of deliberation in Lipman's philosophy for children

Abstract

Dialogue has a central role in Matthew Lipman's program of Philosophy for Children. It is as much the central activity of the Community of Inquiry (CI), as it is the anchor of philosophy. Our interest here is to review in what sense the CI's deliberation is philosophical. In Lipman's work, Dewey's influence leads to a certain conception of and relationship between democracy, citizenship and education. This article, however, does not focus so much on Lipman's Deweyan base -which has already been fruitfully explored- as on the particular articulation that Lipman makes of these ideas for his proposal of Philosophy for Children. The way in which our author configures the Community of Inquiry puts Philosophy in a central, but paradoxically secondary, place. That is, in the CI, Philosophy is articulated with the "democracy as inquiry" in such a way that the scope of possibilities left to Philosophy is limited. We believe that one of the main factors in this limitation is the deliberationist conception of dialogue in the CI. This is what we will try to unravel here, as an initial step in a work that will require successive additional explorations.