The Deweyan Background in P4C

In a 1992 interview, Matthew Lipman affirmed that P4C was “a Deweyan way to go beyond Dewey” thereby explicitly acknowledging the Deweyan inspiration of his project but also asserting his own original contribution to the creation and development of a new educational approach. This achievement was the outcome of his effort to overcome what he later described as “the apparent inconsistency in Dewey’s formulation of the relationship between philosophy and education” (Lipman, 2008, p. 147). This inconsistency had been, indeed, the leading motivation for Lipman’s educational inquiry to the point that finding the solution to this problem would be his “life’s work” (p. ivi). Starting from this acknowledgment, the article highlights the Deweyan background of the P4C pedagogy, showing how Dewey’s ideas constitute a strong educational framework, which grounds and organizes both the curriculum and the device of the community of philosophical inquiry (COPI). However, it also identifies the original contributions offered by Lipman in the development of a new pedagogical framework, which successfully operationalizes a “practical” understanding of the educational role of philosophy. The focus is in particular on three elements within the P4C pedagogy, that represent Lipman’s original contribution to the development of the Deweyan legacy in accordance with a new pedagogical framework: the idea of teaching for thinking; the pattern of the process of inquiry in a P4C session; and the “reconstruction” of a new understanding of philosophy and its educational value, which constitutes the effective overcoming of the inconsistency that Lipman had found in Dewey’s educational thought.