Katerina Deligiorgi / Angela Hobbs / Vivienne Orchard 

Part of Philosophy for Children

6-6.50pm | Thursday 23 June 2011
Room EAS171, New Theatre, East Building, LSE

Speakers
Katerina Deligiorgi, Senior Lecturer in Literature and Philosophy, University of Sussex
Angela Hobbs, Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding of Philosophy and Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Warwick; Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
Vivienne Orchard, Lecturer in French, University of Southampton

Chair
Simon Glendinning , Reader in European Philosophy, European Institute, LSE and Director of the Forum for European Philosophy

Katerina Deligiorgi will compare two Enlightenment educational models, one that she attributes to Rousseau, the other to Kant. Both defend what modern educational theorists call ‘value-oriented’ education, education guided by values and centrally concerned with imparting values. Equally, both place emphasis on the development of critical faculties and offer objectivist defences of their value commitments. The key difference is that between Kant’s formal and Rousseau’s substantive educational teleology. Katerina Deligiorgi seeks to clarify this difference and show the advantages of the former approach.

Although the ancient Greeks do not explicitly recommend teaching philosophy to children, Angela Hobbs believes that any programme for the teaching of philosophy in schools can benefit hugely from aspects of ancient Greek philosophy. The Greeks can assist with a) content (big ethical questions about a flourishing life and community; intriguing paradoxes: ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’), b) method (e.g. clarity of Socratic definition) and c) the promotion of social skills (e.g. philosophy as open-ended dialogue). Angela Hobbs will explore these three contributions with particular reference to Heraclitus, Zeno and Plato.

Jacques Derrida‘s contention that ‘what has been called deconstruction is also the exposure of the institutional identity of the discipline of philosophy’ will form the focus of Vivienne Orchard’s talk in terms of the legacies of this body of work and of how to respond to Derrida’s engagement with the teaching of philosophy in schools in the highly specific context of French education.