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Wolf, Arthur C.

University of British Columbia

This dissertation investigates the pedagogical potential of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy in relation to the American pragmatist philosopher Matthew Lipman’s concept of the Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CPI). In particular, it emphasizes the contribution of what we call an affective conception of thinking. Lipman developed a pedagogical approach called the CPI with the objective of children becoming democratic citizens through cultivating critical, creative and caring thinking skills. These objectives, it is argued, are rooted in a form of transcendental philosophy, especially, a combination of representationalism and subjectivism. Together they define a child as an autonomous democratic citizen subject, that is, a self-legislating thinking individual. However, because the self-legislating procedure is stuck in representation the subject develops a thinking limited to what Deleuze calls an empirical sensibility or empsense. This kind of sensibility only apprehends what representation allows it to apprehend and so a subject cannot be more than the procedures of representation. As a result, experience is subjected to a logic that is external to and imposed on children as children. It is therefore argued that the inquiry experience is mediated by and limited to this logic of representation calls for an alternative. In response, we suggest a way to expand Lipman’s pedagogical approach through an affective conception of thinking as developed by Deleuze. In contrast to Lipman’s representationalism, such thinking is committed to a transcendental empiricism where experience goes beyond the subject and the subject is itself an event of experience. As such, thinking requires a shift from an empirical to a transcendental sensibility or transense. According to Deleuze, it is this kind of sensibility that apprehends the fragmented nature of experience by an encounter with intensity and makes possible a learning connected to pure difference—an apprenticeship in immanence. These come together in the pedagogy of difference as a new approach to practicing communal philosophical inquiry.

Text

2022-09-15

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/82714

Human Development, Learning, and Culture

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/