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childhood
& philosophy a journal of the international council of
philosophical inquiry with children |
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editors’ welcome childhood and philosophy is a journal which has been waiting to
be born at least since socrates sat down in the
unique (at least for us) shelter of the 5th century bc polis and founded a discipline. the
journal’s conception lies much, much later, in the fateful historical
meeting between childhood education and philosophy. this meeting, in turn,
had to wait for rousseau’s mantic
pronouncements of the emile,
sent like a letter in a bottle to the approaching revolution, and for the
slow development, over the course of the 19th and 20th
centuries, of a kind of adult actually capable of listening to children, much
less of hearing them. this, in turn, required the
romantic deconstruction of that very enlightened (male) adult whom, we must
admit, made revolution possible. we can avoid the politically dangerous
speculation as to which of this pair—philosophy or childhood
education—was the father and which the mother by invoking anti-oedipus and the ontology of difference, in which the
possibilities for paternal and maternal work multiply. certainly
education conceived as a vehicle of dissemination of the modern devices for
the constitution of subjectivity excavated for us by foucault
cannot claim paternity rights. the form of education
spawned by disciplinary power has long been an enemy of childhood and philosophy. on the other
hand, “professional” or
“real” philosophers typically scoff at the suggestion that
children are capable of philosophizing, much less doing anything else
remotely “serious.” we believe that a concern with children
doing philosophy is inseparable from a preoccupation with childhood
itself. this gets its basis from the
observation that many adults—and especially both adults who teach
children in schools and professional philosophers—seem in most cases
either to overlook or to flatly deny children’s capacity to think
philosophically. this is profoundly complicated by
the fact that to think children doing philosophy is to redefine philosophy
itself. therefore
it is not enough to say the obvious—that children cannot do philosophy
as we do. to think children doing philosophy asks
for a redefinition of childhood itself. it is both of these redefinitions,
caught in chiasmic relation, which this journal seeks to explore. and this exploration is at least one fundamental dimension
of the group of philosophers and educators who make up the international
council for philosophical inquiry with children. icpic
already has a long history, which is a click away, at www.icpic.org. childhood and philosophy is designed to be one
of its many voices, and to act in concert with the news and information you
will find on its website. in keeping with the lively
polyvocal character of the organization, we have
decided to post/publish papers in at least six languages. we recognize that
this is not a particularly efficient way to deliver the
journal—translating everything into english
would probably, on the average, gather more readers per article—but
this practice signifies our commitment, not only to the integrity of each
piece of work in its mother tongue, but to our hopes for an increasing
multilingualism in general, which is a metaphor (or in fact an index) of an
increase in that polyperspectivalism which we
consider to be the hope of rethinking childhood and philosophy. we hope that you
will feel encouraged to submit articles, whether in english
or your mother tongue. as you will see within, childhood and philosophy welcomes not just scholarly and research
articles, but compilations from philosophers and/or educators, transcripts,
curriculum samples, book reviews, reports on current projects, poetry and
art. welcome to childhood
and philosophy! david kennedy –
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