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Amechanon, Vol. I / 2016-2018, ISSN: 2459-2846
Conclusion
As a part of a research about Community of Inquiry, conducted by children and adolescents
who participated in mourning and memorial sites on the Internet, issues arose relating to
the meaning of the body, the life in light of the presence of death and the personal
narratives that were constructed as a result of the spiritual encounter with the memory of
the deceased.
In this article, I have analyzed these issues under the three concepts: (1) The «living memory
body of the dead person»; (2) The «un-present body that accompanied me»; (3) The
meaning of «life after death».
According to their perception, life, in the spiritual and emotional sense, doesn’t end with
their relative’s physical death. All the children and adolescents who participated in the
conversations raised philosophical issues which in one way or another touched upon the
relationship of the living with the dead and the meaning of death in the young people’s
lives by their use of the Internet which allowed for the preservation of individual memory,
today making it a dynamic one.
Even philosophical inquiry surrounding sensitive issues such as death and the attitude
toward it have proved that children and adolescents can carry out a process which Gareth
Matthewes has termed «philosophical freshness and inventiveness that is hard for even
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the most imaginative adults to match» . The engagement in the deepest meanings of life
in the context of memory of the dead was revealed as intensive and valuable and branched
out to relevant issues. The philosophic community of inquiry thus allows children and
teenagers to develop complex thinking, thereby cultivating their reasoning abilities, critical
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thinking, caring thinking, and creative thinking towards Others .
215 Matthewes, G., The Philosophy of Childhood, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994, p.
17.
216 Accorinti, S., «Philosophy for Children», Encyclopedia of philosophy of education, 2000,
http://eepat.net/doku.php?id=philosophy_for_children, last visit: 15/04/2016.
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