Since it's inception, the Philosophy for Children program created by Matthew Lipman has been intimately connected to literature. This article begins by revising this relationship and the ideas that inspired Lipman to center his work on a sequence of novels favoring the development of "higher order" thinking in children. Next, it examines how literature has been modified in a Latin American context. Finally, the nature of the relationship between philosophy and literature within the practice of the "thinking experience" is re-considered. The thought process is a diffuse zone where literature and philosophy re-ecounter each other in their original locations. There is something in the particular configurations of language that mantain a relationship with thinking.

From 2004 to 2008, a study was conducted with fifteen students (aged between fourteen and fifteen) who used philosophy on a regular basis during the past four years. Originally, the study was designed to examine how these students use their critical thinking skills on three school subjects, namely philosophy, science and history. They were observed within five problem-based learning activities (two in science, two in history and one in philosophy). To complete the data collected, three focus groups were conducted. These interviews were designed to help students express their views on their role inside each school subject involved in the study, on the epistemic conception they have for each of them and on the way they use their critical thinking skills inside of each. Pupils were also questioned about learning they perform in community of philosophical inquiry: Is it useful in other school matters? If yes, how? If not, why? Do they use it in their daily life? If yes, how? If not, why? The answers they have provided to these questions are revealing. According to them, it is in their everyday life that the teaching from philosophy is the most useful. Furthermore, among all the things they learn at school, it is those in philosophy that they use the most outside school. Those indications show the importance of integrating the community of philosophical inquiry into the students’ general education. Indeed, according to what they say, the philosophical practices are the school experiences that prepare them most for life. This last issue will be the focus of this paper.

This text is a philosophical interpretation of the film VALENTÍN (Alejandro Agresti, 2002). It approaches the narrative of the cinematographic script as a permanent exercise of the child’s way of asking, living, creating, dreaming, loving, thinking, being happy. In a desolate world of adults without answers, Valentín makes of his life and stories an experience of infancy that interrogates, that asks, that looks for projects to create experiences of dialogue and love with those around him. Valentín teaches philosophizing to the school, to the family, to the friends, and to philosophy itself, and in that teaching he traces a history for himself and holds up mirrors to the other; he makes of his questions the questions of the world around him. He makes of his questions our own questions--the questions of today, of always. Those are the ones we seek to interrogate here, in order to see a lonely childhood in a lesson of philosophizing, and to understand Valentin’s childhood as the poetic challenge to build a world of love and poetic transformation of himself, of the others, of ourselves.

Moral education is an important task of school education, especially for P4C. Already in primary school the moral judgement competence can be encouraged with the help of dilemma-discussions. Thus dilemma-discussions seem to be a new methodical approach for P4C. This article contains the results of an empirical study.

This paper investigates the importance of the social dimension in the conception of the concept developed by Dewey. It explores the concept as a component of the meaning of the experience. As such, philosophy can be understood as the study of the experience of life, and a process of reconstruction of concepts through the critique of habits and cultural prejudices, and the construction of new hypotheses that operate as a source of both emancipation and enrichment. The concept operates like an instrument in the conduct of intelligent experience, and language plays a basic role in this process as the “instrument of the instruments.” Language makes it possible to represent the uses of the concept, and to enlarge experience indefinitely through free communication. Democratic life is the only form life worthy of human beings. In it, conjoint associated experience reaches its full form in the free and necessary communication of concepts between individuals, and in the shared action that provides continuity in social life. Education itself is the experience itself of associated, meaningful, communicated life.