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187 10 Matthew Lipman and the P4C Movement Ironically, Gareth Matthews’s own personal strengths as a philosopher who can engage and lead children in philosophic inquiry have been grounds for criticism among some writers on the subject of pursuing wisdom in schools. Matthews’s vast knowledge of philosophic literature and traditions informs both his dialogues with children and his use of children’s books to encourage philosophic wondering, but it does so in a way that academics such as Lynn Glueck and Harry Brighouse doubt would be replicable en masse among teachers who are being trained in P4C programming for schools: He [Matthews] is, himself, a fine philosopher, and it is not inconceiv‑ able that his success with the children he discusses in the book turns on his own skills in drawing out the latent capacities of the children, in a way that could not be widely replicated by teachers in schools.1 Matthew Lipman, too, distinguishes Matthews’s approach from his own P4C model. He views Matthews’s writings as demonstrating well “how adults attuned to philosophy can engage children in conversations that disclose and enlarge upon the philosophical dimensions of the child’s thinking”; however, he seems to view Mat‑ thews’s successes with children as being possible only for adults who are—unlike the vast majority of teachers—already familiar with what it means to philosophize. Although he writes that Matthews’s work is helpful for teachers and “quite comple‑ mentary with the P4C approach,” Lipman nonetheless supposes that the settings for Matthews’s conversations “are much more likely to be the home rather than the school, and the adult is a bit more likely to be a parent rather than a teacher.”2 What Lipman and the others involved in the P4C movement seek to create is a kind of systematized philosophy training program for teachers as well as for students. Philosophy as Transdisciplinary Metacognition In order to assess how well Lipman’s P4C movement embodies genuine philoso‑ phizing, we must first examine what he takes philosophy to be, and next how he 188 The Pursuit of Wisdom and Happiness in Education professes that philosophy might be taught. He defines philosophy as “self‑corrective thinking”; that is, philosophy “is thinking inquiring into itself for the purpose of transforming itself into better thinking.” Understood as “thinking about think‑ ing,” philosophy is often referred to using the term metacognition. Lipman writes, “The metacognitive act is what makes self‑correction possible. It is one thing for mental acts and thinking and inquiry skills to be directed at the world, but it is something else again for them to be directed at themselves.”3 Metacognition, or “thinking about thought,” becomes philosophy’s highest pursuit in P4C, and Lipman holds that “just as the perfection of the thinking process culminates in philosophy, so too is philosophy, par excellence, the finest instrument yet devised for the perfection of the thinking process.”4 Having as its aim the cultivation of excellence in thinking through metacog‑ nition, philosophy “attempts to clarify and illuminate unsettled, controversial issues that are so generic that no scientific discipline is equipped to deal with them.”5 Hence, alongside its metacognitive aspect, Lipman isolates the general or “generic” nature of philosophy’s questions as one of its key features; it is for this reason that he calls metaphysics “philosophy at its most comprehensive,” since it “involves issues of maximum generality.”6 As the quest for what is “generic,” philosophy is distinguished by its propensity “to transcend the points of view of the individual disciplines”;7 it is distinct as “a discipline that has traditionally concerned itself with the interrelationship among the different intellectual disciplines”; its “peculiarity” is that “the questions it raises deal with the nature of human knowledge in a way that is, so to speak, directly at right‑angles with the distribution of non‑philosophical subject matters.”8 For these reasons, philosophy is called “transparochial” or “trans‑ disciplinary.” Lipman and his associates point out that being “transdisciplinary” also marks philosophy out as “a countervailing force to the overspecialization rampant in the educational system,” and they view philosophy as a unifying force against the “fragmentation” of the school curriculum. Philosophy as “the Parent Discipline” Besides identifying philosophy as a metacognitive, transdisciplinary activity, Lip‑ man isolates what he takes to be another characteristic of philosophy. Citing Socrates’s exchange with Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic, he makes the claim that on their own, the arts and sciences are incapable...

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