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Education

Teaching Philosophy vs Teaching To Philosophise

Pablo Cevallos Estarellas reviews the developments that caused professional to triumph over amateur philosophy in education, and proposes a way forward.

If to do philosophy is to ask questions of a special kind about central human problems and then to grapple with them in a rigorous way, most people can in principle learn how to philosophise. This means that unlike most academic disciplines, philosophy has two legitimate manifestations: the professional practice of philosophical inquiry, with reference to the canon of historical philosophical works, and the amateur practice of philosophical inquiry, without reference to previous philosophy. In this article I’ll distinguish between these two expressions of philosophical practice and explore their educational applications.

Two Manifestations of Philosophical Practice

We need to begin with a definition of philosophy. This is tricky, as it seems that there are as many conceptions of philosophy as there are philosophers.

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