The Lives of Their Minds

This book is an attempt to restore the connection between education and issues within analytic philosophy, and to humanize the analytic style of philosophizing, so that it becomes an activity involving persons, within a community of inquiry (CoI).

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Many topics of interest to analytic philosophers (often involving issues of semantics, epistemology and ontology) are, in fact, extremely relevant to education; but the connection is rarely made. The Lives of their Minds: Education, Community and Inquiry is an attempt to restore this connection, and also to humanize the analytic style of philosophizing, so that it becomes an activity involving persons, directed towards a better understanding of what it means to be a person in the world.

The Lives of their Minds: Education, Community and Inquiry is intended as a major revision of Teaching for Better Thinking: The Classroom Community of Inquiry (L. J. Splitter and the late A. M. Sharp, ACER Press, Melbourne, 1995). The author remains passionate about and committed to the idea of classrooms (and other teaching and learning environments) functioning as dialogical communities of inquiry, irrespective of the discipline or subject matter which they are covering. The Community of Inquiry (CoI), exemplified so powerfully in philosophy for children, is regarded as a paradigm shift in formal education, from both the teacher’s and the students’ points of view.

The book has several underlying themes: firstly, deepening our understanding of CoI, as a pedagogic, affective and ethical construct well-suited to what we now know about how children learn and what they require from those who teach them; secondly, providing a critical analysis of a range of educational issues which have been, and still are, both topical and contentious, including philosophy in schools, levels of thinking, transcending cultural differences, moral education, authenticity, personhood, identity issues, motivation, and the subjective-objective dichotomy; and thirdly, as reflected in the title, that education is, first and foremost, about nurturing, improving and celebrating the life of the mind or, rather, the lives of their minds reflecting the author’s commitment to the key components of CoI – that good thinking, whether embodied in single individuals or more generally, is the product of collaborative thinking in a community of thinkers; and that the crucial threads which bind the community together are, fundamentally, dialogical ones – a point which relies on a powerful, if counter-intuitive, thesis about the interdependence of thought and talk.