IAPC Visiting Scholars Oral Histories

Follow

• 

  Jackson, Thomas E. Interview May 2024

  Thomas E. Jackson and Maughn Rollins Gregory

  In this interview, Dr. Thomas E. Jackson talks about philosophical wonder he experienced as a child around the experience of suffering, and how that followed him into his university studies. He describes his undergraduate and masters studies in medicine, psychology, and philosophy at the University of Toledo, and his formative encounter with Professor Ramakrishna Puligandla, who introduced him to Hindu and Buddhist philosophy and contemplative practices. Jackson took his PhD in comparative Asian and Western philosophy at the University of Hawai’i, after which he co-founded the Hawaiian international film festival. After meeting Dr. Barry Curtis, who had introduced philosophy for children on Hawai’i’s “Big Island,” from the University of Hawai’i’s Hilo campus in 1978, Jackson attended the three-week summer seminar in philosophy for children in Mendham, New Jersey, run by the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC) at Montclair State College. There he met and was mentored by Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp. Jackson brought “small-p” philosophy to schools in and around Honolulu as a faculty specialist in the philosophy department at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa. He discovered commonalities between philosophy for children and Hawaiian culture and found ways to adapt the former to the latter. He created a unique philosophy in the schools program, “P4C Hawai’i,” which was funded by the Hawaiian Department of Education for many years. In the program, teachers facilitated philosophy sessions once each week on their own, and another time with a visiting philosopher or philosophy graduate student. Teachers also met together once a week for a “Philosophy for Teachers” session and received university credit. Jackson created a university course to prepare philosophy graduate students to work in the program and invented several innovations to the Montclair model, including “magic words” like IDUS (I don’t understand), the WRAITEC: The Good Thinker’s Toolkit, and a Philosophy in Schools Startup Kit. https://p4chawaii.org/wp-content/uploads/colvin.pdf”> In 1995 Jackson conducted the first philosophy for children workshop in China. He mentored the first doctoral dissertations on philosophy for children to come from the University of Hawai’i’s philosophy department. In 2005 Jackson met Mr. Eiji Uehiro, founder of the Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education in Tokyo, Japan, who offered support for P4C Hawai’i and in 2012 the Foundation gifted $1.25 million to fund https://p4chawaii.org/”>The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Uehiro Academy for Philosophy and Ethics in Education.

• 

  Lipman, Karen Interview 22 August 2023

  Karen Lipman, Peter Shea, Maughn Rollins Gregory, and Walter Omar Kohan

  Karen Lipman is the daughter of Matthew Lipman, co-founder of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children at Montclair State University, and Wynona Moore Lipman, the first African-American female Senator of the State of New Jersey. In this interview by Peter Shea, Maughn Rollins Gregory, and Walter O. Kohan, Karen shares memories of her parents and talks about what she learned from each of them. This interview was conducted on 22 August 2023 in preparation for the international celebration of Matthew Lipman's Centenary two days later.