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ISBN

0-916834-23-9

Target Grades

Adult Education

Publication Date

1987

Publisher

Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children

Number of Pages

64

Summary

Like the other Students in the Thinking and Learning Environment, Harry Prime has enrolled in an evening course in search of his High School Equivalency Certificate. Before long, he and his friends discover that some ways of thinking are better than others. They promptly turn their newfound powers of critical reasoning upon such matters as science, art, religion, education and mind. As they proceed with their discussions, they disclose what it is to form a community of inquiry.

Harry Prime (like Harry Stottlemeier's Discovery, another philosophical novel by Matthew Lipman) is a fictional introduction to philosophy and logic. Some will see it as a college or secondary school text, especially when supplemented with the instructor's manual, Philosophical Inquiry, also published by the I.A.P.C. Others will see it as an exciting encounter with ideas. And still others will view it as a sustained, disciplinary exercise in careful, thoughtful reading.

Excerpt

It probably wouldn't have happened if Harry hadn't fallen asleep in the TALE class that evening. (TALE stood for Thinking qnd Learning Environment.)

Well, he didn't really fall asleep either. His mind just wandered off. The teacher, Kevin Bradley—everyone called him Kevin—had been talking about the solar system. He'd been talking about how all the planets revolve around the sun, and Harry just stopped listening, because all at once he had this picture in his mind of the great, flaming sun and all the smaller planets revolving steadily around it.

Suddenly Harry knew that Kevin was looking directly at him. Harry heard Kevin address him: "Harry Prime! Can you tell us what has a long tail and revolves around the sun once every 77 years?"

Harry realized he had no idea of the answer Kevin expected. A long tail? For a moment he played with the idea of saying, "a dog star." (Harry remembered his daughter once reading to him from the Child's Book of Knowledge that the star named Sirius was called the "dog star.") But he wasn't sure that Kevin would find such an answer very funny.

Kevin didn't have much of a sense of humor, but he was patient. Harry knew Kevin would wait a few seconds for Harry to figure something out.

Harry could still hear Kevin saying, "All planets revolve about the sun." And this thing with a tail: it also goes around the sun. Could it also be a planet? It seemed worth a try. "A planet?" he asked, rather doubtfully.

Harry wasn't prepared for the snickers from the class. If he'd been paying attention, he would have heard Kevin say that the thing in question was Halley's comet. "Comets go around the sun just as planets do," Kevin had said, "but they definitely are not planets."

Fortunately the class was over at that point. But as Harry rode the subway home, he still felt badly about not having been able to answer Kevin correctly.

Keywords

logic, philosophy, education, aesthetics, ethics

Disciplines

Adult and Continuing Education | Education | Philosophy

1. Harry Prime (novel)

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