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Amechanon, Vol. I / 2016-2018, ISSN: 2459-2846

When you did that, this transformation of classroom to an inquiry, did you do it in a way

that was influenced by Lipman or rather it was something that it had moved a lot from
Lipman philosophy and then you did your own thing somehow differently?

In a way I did something differently.

From which point of view?

I think that what was different was just my commitment to falsificate the problem …
because my master was about philosophy of language, I have translated Popper in Italian;

so my disposition was always critical, of falsification of Lipman position. I always was trying
to find something that it could falsificate that all people can philosophize, that this kind of

program it could be useful for all. Trying then to stress these points, to do this practice in
the boundaries and trying to stress the limits of the program: this was the force that we

had, the power that we had in Italy in my experience, my university in Padova: that would
be useful for me in order to accredite the practice, because when colleagues of mine, the

logicians,were saying me that such an effort was impossible, I was trying to falsificate this
& do logic with children. When psychologists tell me «No, you cannot do this with so young

children, that is to involve them to argumentation, because of the laws of development,
the studies of Piaget and so on», I was trying to show that the hypothetical state of Piaget

is not so important in order to argue, to be involved in argumentation with children. This
critical falsification created a lot of barriers but also opened a zone of proximal

development for my practice in P4C.

So, is philosophy for all? We have to do it with all ... but I don’t know who is all.. But i know

that this children with autism for instance is part of the whole. So, ok. We can do
philosophy with him and put him in the circle… yes, we can try… because we have to

transform ourselves, we have to transform our practice, we have to transform our
discourse, we have to transform our work, our mind in order to create new ways of inquiry.

And this was the first strong commitment I had and it was really linked to disability studies.
So the first phase for me was the commitment to do disability, as I am also professor in

inclusive education, teaching for teachers for children with special educational needs
(which in fact is a stupid definition, because all of us we have special educational needs, so

it is about a logical category completely without sense). This part was the strongest part
of my practice in Italy: doing P4C with diversity and with different frames also in the

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