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01. Harry Stottlemeier's Discovery (novel)
Matthew Lipman
One day Harry finds himself giving the wrong answer in science class and begins to wonder where he has gone wrong. This reflection soon involves his classmates, who begin to think together about the nature of thinking, inquiry and knowledge. With the help of their teacher, Harry and his classmates discover rules of formal and informal logic, relational logic and hypothetical thinking—-not as ends in themselves, but as tools in helping them understand themselves and their world. Some of the ideas they begin to explore this way include education, mind, rights, religion, art, cause and effect, causes and reasons, and fallibilism. Set within a group of middle school classmates and their families, this novel offers several models of reasonable dialogue, among young people and adults. Adults with a background in philosophy will easily recognize the perennial philosophical issues raised in the story. However, no such background is necessary for young people or adults to enjoy this thought-provoking novel.
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02. First Edition (1974) of Harry Stottlemeier's Discovery
Matthew Lipman
Harry Stottlemeier's Discovery is the student book for a project in philosophical thinking. It offers a model of dialogue—both of children with one another and of children with adults. The story is set among a classroom of children who begin to understand the basics of logical reasoning when Harry, who isn't paying attention in class, says that a comet is a planet because he remembers hearing that comets revolve around the sun just as planets do. The events that follow in the classroom and outside of school are a recreation of the ways that children night might find themselves thinking and acting. The story is a teaching model; non-authoritarian, and anti-indoctrinating, it respects the value of inquiry and reasoning, encourages the development of alternative modes of thought and imagination, and suggests how children are able to learn from one another. Further, it sketches what it might be like to live and participate in a small in a community where children have their own interests, yet respect each other as people, and are capable at times of engaging in cooperative inquiry for no other reason than the satisfaction of doing so.
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03. PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY: Instructional Manual to Accompany Harry Stottlemeier's Discovery
Matthew Lipman, Ann Margaret Sharp, and Frederick S. Oscanyan
This instructional manual includes hundreds of short, accessible explanations of the philosophical ideas and issues written into HARRY the novel, and as such is a valuable introduction to philosophy. Adults with no experience in academic philosophy will have no trouble using this manual to engage young people in philosophical dialogue. The manual provides discussion plans and exercises to help the students think for themselves about the philosophical ideas most relevant to their experience. The manual is also a primer in critical thinking and formal and informal logic, which are treated as helpful tools for inquiry. Students will find the logic meaningful as they are able to use these new tools to find answers to their own philosophical questions.
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04. Sources and References for Harry Stottlemeier's Discovery
Matthew Lipman
This sequential bibliography matches the 1982 edition of Harry Stottlemeier's Discovery page by page. It contains both sources—works that influenced Matthew Lipman in writing the novel, references to philosophical works he and Ann Margaret Sharp recommend to explore of the novels’ philosophical themes, and brief commentary on them by Lipman.
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05. Lisa (novel)
Matthew Lipman
LISA is the story of a school year in the life of an adolescent girl and her classmates, a year studded with physical, aesthetic and ethical awakenings. Various events in these young people's lives prompt them to puzzle over such issues as animal rights, sexism, racism, justice, divorce and death. All of them struggle with issues of identity and thinking for oneself - philosophical issues of perennial concern to adolescents. As they begin to recognize the ethical dimensions of their experience, Lisa and her friends puzzle over such philosophical concepts as the right, the fair, the good, perfection, and naturalism. In so doing, they become aware of their interdependence with one another and with nature, and begin to appreciate the complexity of ethical concerns and the multiple capacities involved in making sound ethical judgments.
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06. First Edition (1976) of Lisa
Matthew Lipman
LISA is the story of a school year in the life of an adolescent girl and her classmates, a year studded with physical, aesthetic and ethical awakenings. Various events in these young people's lives prompt them to puzzle over such issues as animal rights, sexism, racism, justice, divorce and death. All of them struggle with issues of identity and thinking for oneself - philosophical issues of perennial concern to adolescents. As they begin to recognize the ethical dimensions of their experience, Lisa and her friends puzzle over such philosophical concepts as the right, the fair, the good, perfection, and naturalism. In so doing, they become aware of their interdependence with one another and with nature, and begin to appreciate the complexity of ethical concerns and the multiple capacities involved in making sound ethical judgments.
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07. ETHICAL INQUIRY: Instructional Manual to Accompany Lisa
Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp
The aim of this program is to provide students with the tools they need to deliberate well about ethical issues. These tools include anticipating consequences, taking all the circumstances into account, giving good reasons, universalizing, being consistent, and projecting ideals of the people they would like to be and the world they would like to live in. In addition to the use of such tools, good ethical inquiry also involves an understanding of metaphysical, ethical, social, and aesthetic concepts. For this reasons, ETHICAL INQUIRY provides a host of introductions to concepts such as self, time, personhood, reciprocity, and freedom, as well as hundreds of discussion plans and exercises encouraging students to probe these concepts. This manual is a valuable guide to facilitating ethical inquiry with adolescents in ways that enable them to avoid both dogmatism and naïve relativism, to reach reflective equilibrium in their ethical deliberations.
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09. My Name Is Myshkin: A Philosophical Novel for Children
David Kennedy
My Name is Myshkin is a philosophical novel written with children ages approximately 10-14 in mind. The book offers a fantasy adventure plot line interweaving narrative themes of ecology, mythology, psychology, spirituality and social justice, which interplay with its more purely philosophical material. Myshkin, the ten-year old narrator of the story, engages in numerous conversations with three school friends. A few of the many questions they take up are: whether one “is” one’s body, how we can tell what is real, animals and humans, youth and age, what is alive, the origins of evil, superstition and belief, whether there is a true “objective” account of anything, whether one can fully know or be known by another person, the suffering and injustice in the world, and ones responsibility for it.
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10. Dreamers: Adventures in dreams and dreams of adventures ...
David Kennedy
Dreamersis a philosophical adventure novel for ages 12 and beyond, told through the eyes of four pre-adolescent children of varying ethnic and racial backgrounds living in a small town in the American Southwest, who embark together on a school inquiry project centered on the phenomenon of dreaming. Not only do they record and share their dreams with each other, they inquire together into the role and status of dreaming in cultures past and present, the interpretation of dreams, the scientific analysis of dreaming, and the role of dreams in mythology and religion. The dramatic events of the novel are interspersed with discussions around concepts in philosophy of nature, and evoke the perennial re-articulation of vitalism, hylozoism and panpsychism in the philosophical tradition, and the queering of the distinction between the organic and the inorganic, the human and the non-human implicit in a post-human, relational ontology. See the online instructional manual at: https://sites.google.com/view/dreamers-david-kennedy/home
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