Towards a Great community of philosophical inquiry?

The period of the pandemic, with the increasing role of experts in the public debate (and the resistance that it caused), has re-proposed the topicality of the dispute between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, the former advocating a sort of elitist democracy, whose pillars are the specialists, and the latter confirming his lifelong commitment to participatory democracy, without ceding, though, to the romantic idea of the omni-competent citizen. In this paper, I would like to argue that the CPI, as a pedagogical approach, can represent (one of) the tool(s) to operationalize Dewey’s idea of democracy as “the crucial expression of modern life, […] not so much an addition to the scientific and industrial tendencies as it is the perception of their social or spiritual meaning.” In particular, I will first provide an interpretation of CPI at the crossroads of Dewey’s notion of “stages of logical thought” and Peirce’s view of “four methods of fixation of belief”. And, secondly, while Peirce and Dewey predominantly remained committed to the idea of scientific inquiry as a model, I will insinuate that, in order to respond to Walter Lippmann’s challenge, the philosophical dimension needs to be fully valorized and, accordingly, turning classrooms (and also other educational settings) into CPIs can really represent a stepping stone to the promotion of the Great Community.