Philosophy of Childhood – serie

By examining the parent-child relationship, Childlike Peace in Merleau-Ponty and Levinas argues that the primordial structure of our personal encounters with others should be understood as a dialectical spiral. Drawing on the work of twentieth-century philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas, and informed by recent advances in cognitive neuroscience and child development, Brock Bahler develops a phenomenological description of the parent-child relationship in order to articulate an account of intersubjectivity that is fundamentally ethically oriented, dialogical, and mutually dynamic. This dialectical spiral—in contrast to Cartesian tradition of the subject and the Hegelian master-slave dialectic—suggests that our lives are equiprimordially interwoven with both the richness of mutual engagement and the responsibility to be for-the-other. The parent-child relationship provides the basis for a theoretical account of intersubjectivity that is marked by a creative interaction between self and other that cannot be reduced to an economic exchange, a totalizing structure, or a unilateral asymmetrical responsibility. In conversation with the philosophical thought of Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Hegel, Sartre, and Freud, as well as recent research in cognitive neuroscience and child development, this work will be of interest for those working in the fields of continental philosophy, embodied cognition, philosophy of childhood, psychoanalysis, psychology, philosophy for children (P4C), and education.

Although philosophy of childhood has always played some part in philosophical discourse, its emergence as a field of postmodern theory follows the rise, in the late nineteenth century, of psychoanalysis, for which childhood is a key signifier. Then in the mid-twentiethcentury Philipe Aries’s seminal Centuries of Childhood introduced the master-concept of childhood as a social and cultural invention, thereby weakening the strong grip of biological metaphors on imagining childhood. Today, while philosophy of childhood per se is a relatively boundaryless field of inquiry, it is one that has clear distinctions from history, anthropology, sociology, and even psychology of childhood. This volume of essays, which represents the work of a diverse, international set of scholars, explores the shapes and boundaries of the emergent field, and the possibilities for mediating encounters between its multiple sectors, including history of philosophy, philosophy of education, pedagogy, literature and film, psychoanalysis, family studies, developmental theory, ethics, history of subjectivity, history of culture, and evolutionary theory. The resultis an engaging introduction to philosophy of childhood for those unfamiliar with this area of scholarship, and a timely compendium and resource for those for whom it is a new disciplinary articulation.

Although philosophy of childhood has always played some part in philosophical discourse, its emergence as a field of postmodern theory follows the rise, in the late nineteenth century, of psychoanalysis, for which childhood is a key signifier. Then in the mid-twentiethcentury Philipe Aries’s seminal Centuries of Childhood introduced the master-concept of childhood as a social and cultural invention, thereby weakening the strong grip of biological metaphors on imagining childhood. Today, while philosophy of childhood per se is a relatively boundaryless field of inquiry, it is one that has clear distinctions from history, anthropology, sociology, and even psychology of childhood. This volume of essays, which represents the work of a diverse, international set of scholars, explores the shapes and boundaries of the emergent field, and the possibilities for mediating encounters between its multiple sectors, including history of philosophy, philosophy of education, pedagogy, literature and film, psychoanalysis, family studies, developmental theory, ethics, history of subjectivity, history of culture, and evolutionary theory. The resultis an engaging introduction to philosophy of childhood for those unfamiliar with this area of scholarship, and a timely compendium and resource for those for whom it is a new disciplinary articulation.

Imagining with Purpose in Childhood explores the question: How might moral imagining be conceived to support the cultivation of responsible autonomy in childhood? It argues that when conceived as a conscious, flexible process, moral imagining may contribute to children’s emerging agency by expanding and enriching their envisioned options for what they believe is worth valuing within their current and future circumstances, thereby helping to make their autonomy more responsible. Natalie M. Fletcher proposes the conception of deliberate moral imagining, understood as the purposeful envisioning of a given context from multiple frames of reference in response to a real-world encounter, with the goal of bringing to light possibilities for what seems reasonable to value in order to broaden the moral lens through which lived experiences are approached and assessed. This book explores how deliberate moral imagining may assist children in confronting some important challenges to responsible autonomy that risk constricting their envisioning of the overarching contexts most influential in childhood: their relation to others (how they view and treat them), their relation to self (how they perceive and value themselves) and their relation to knowledge (how they learn and what they claim to know about the world). In response to the respective challenges of narrow empathetic scope, conversion inhibition and inaccurate pseudoenvironments, deliberate moral imagining may help enrich children’s “mental landscape” by cultivating relational openness through three crucial autonomy supports: empathic engagement, self-efficacy and reasonableness. The book draws on three theoretical frameworks—neo-Aristotelian virtue theory, the Capabilities Approach and classical pragmatism—and includes a case study of the Philosophy for Children program as an illustrative example of deliberate moral imagining in action.

Outlining a transformational pedagogical philosophy that seeks to foster strong and meaningful bonds to the natural environment forged in childhood, this book targets some of the central social challenges entailed by planetary climate disturbance.In recent decades, social scientists have been studying and drawing attention to what has been labelled “nature-deficit disorder,” a psychological condition in which the young child is deprived of meaningful contact with the natural environment and suffers a diminution of well-being. Brian Elliott brings together the ideas of love of place (topophilia) and love of living nature (biophilia) to propose a radically transformed approach to pedagogical theory and practice that would counter the widespread nature deficit typically experienced by children in more affluent countries. The need for this transformation is especially pressing in the age of the Anthropocene, in which it is confidently predicted that systematic climatic disturbance will begin to become relentlessly severe within the next two decades. The pedagogical approach is also predicated on young learners’ inherent interest in leading happy, meaningful lives, a goal furthered by unsupervised time in the physical world around them, especially in middle childhood. Drawing a wide variety of literary, scientific, ecological, and philosophical sources, Elliott makes a passionate and compelling case to stop confining our childing within the classroom and get them back into the open air of the natural environment.

Expands the concept of Mathew Lipman’s Community of Philosophical Inquiry through a reading of Deleuze.In this book, Arthur Wolf uses the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to develop a more inclusive pedagogy, especially focusing on the implications of affective thinking. The exclusion of the affective in what it means to think directly impacts the lives of children by limiting their existential sensibilities and capacity to sense the world as immanently given. The conceptualization of affective thinking and its relation to pedagogy has not been sufficiently developed, leading to the question of how to relate the affective to thinking and how to develop its consequences for pedagogy. Two ideas that are paramount to Deleuze’s project in theorizing what it means to think are “affect”—used to describe an impingement on, or modulation of, a body’s intensity of existing—and “immanence”—used as an ontological commitment that this intensity of existing is univocal, expressive, and relational. By analyzing Deleuze’s theory, Wolf shows the ways in which Matthew Lipman’s Philosophy for Children approach and its pedagogical cornerstone, the Community of Philosophical Inquiry, can be expanded and brings his ideas into the pedagogical realm.

Philosophical Children in Literary Situations: Toward a Phenomenology of Education argues that both phenomenology and children’s literature can assist one another in understanding the lived experience of children. Through careful readings of central figures in the phenomenological tradition, including Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, Costello introduces both the novice and the scholar to the phenomenological method of describing community, emotion, religion, gender, and loss—experiences that are central to all humans, but especially to the developing child. When turning to literary analysis, Costello uses the phenomenological theory discussed to open up the literary texts of familiar and award-winning children’s chapter books toward new layers of interpretation, reading such novels as To Kill a Mockingbird, A Wrinkle in Time, and Charlotte’s Web to participate in ongoing conversations about childhood perception within children’s literature studies and philosophy for children. Scholars of philosophy, education, literary studies, and psychology will find this book particularly useful.