If this journal aims at the emergence, identification, questioning, investigation of philosophical places and ways and their peculiar cartography and kinesiology within the various educational spacetimes, the ways, the forms, the foldings, the narratives, the incorporations of practical philosophy, the philosophical re-deconstruction of the concept of application, the ways, the forms, the foldings the transformations, the turns of applied philosophy, the philosophical comprehensions of the concept, of appearances, of movements, of voices of action within life forms, it is, after all, a bewildered /amechanon journal. Αmechanon in the face of its aims, of the things that must emerge, in the face of forms and their foldings, in the face of the various turns and meaning reconstructions, in the face of the question about the practical and the applied, about philosophy itself and philosophical comprehension. Amechanon as impractical, ineffective, unskilled, inexpugnabilis, ineluctabilis, inennarabilis, immensus, infinitus, incredibilis, as bewildered speech, in a amechanon manner, to stand with the things it includes in puzzlement, with the infinite, as the sea of Socratic aporia and its stupor are, like stupor. An alien speech.

Ὦ Σώκρατες, ἤκουον μὲν ἔγωγε πρὶν καὶ συγγε–νέσθαι σοι ὅτι σὺ οὐδὲν ἄλλο ἢ αὐτός τε ἀπορεῖς καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους ποιεῖς ἀπορεῖν·καὶ νῦν, ὥς γέ μοι δοκεῖς, γοητεύεις με καὶ φαρμάττεις καὶ ἀτεχνῶς κατεπᾴδεις, ὥστε μεστὸν ἀπορίας γεγονέναι. καὶ δοκεῖς μοι παντελῶς, εἰ δεῖ τι καὶ σκῶψαι, ὁμοιότατος εἶναι τό τε εἶδος καὶ τἆλλα ταύτῃ τῇ πλατείᾳ νάρκῃ τῇ θαλαττίᾳ·καὶ γὰρ αὕτη τὸν ἀεὶ πλησιά–ζοντα καὶ ἁπτόμενον ναρκᾶν ποιεῖ, καὶ σὺ δοκεῖς μοι νῦν ἐμὲ τοιοῦτόν τι πεποιηκέναι, [ναρκᾶν]·ἀληθῶς γὰρ ἔγωγε καὶ τὴν ψυχὴν καὶ τὸ στόμα ναρκῶ, καὶ οὐκ ἔχω ὅτι ἀποκρίνωμαί σοι. καίτοι μυριάκις γε περὶ ἀρετῆς παμπόλλους λόγους εἴρηκα καὶ πρὸς πολλούς, καὶ πάνυ εὖ, ὥς γε ἐμαυτῷ ἐδόκουν νῦν δὲ οὐδ’ ὅτι ἐστὶν τὸ παράπαν ἔχω εἰπεῖν. καί μοι δοκεῖς εὖ βουλεύεσθαι οὐκ ἐκπλέων ἐνθένδε οὐδ’ ἀποδημῶν εἰ γὰρ ξένος ἐν ἄλλῃ πόλει τοιαῦτα ποιοῖς, τάχ’ ἂν ὡς γόης ἀπαχθείης [Μένων, 80a-b]

 Socrates, I used to be told, before I began to meet you, [80a] that yours was just a case of being in doubt yourself and making others doubt also : and so now I find you are merely bewitching me with your spells and incantations, which have reduced me to utter perplexity. And if I am indeed to have my jest, I consider that both in your appearance and in other respects you are extremely like the flat torpedo sea-fish; for it benumbs anyone who approaches and touches it, and something of the sort is what I find you have done to me now. For in truth [80b] I feel my soul and my tongue quite benumbed, and I am at a loss what answer to give you. And yet on countless occasions I have made abundant speeches on virtue to various people—and very good speeches they were, so I thought—but now I cannot say one word as to what it is. You are well advised, I consider, in not voyaging or taking a trip away from home; for if you went on like this as a stranger in any other city you would very likely be taken up for a wizard [Menon, 80a-b] [W.R.M. Lamb, https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/].

And, if all these can pass into the background of such a journal, on the foreground words seem anything but bewildered, as a paradox which cannot be confronted, only to be brought to light as much as possible. Amechanon monitors the moves of the Laboratory of Research on Practical Philosophy, attempting to bring this attitude to light, as a primary attitude of the Laboratory itself. With the intention of including the gaps, the adversities, the aporiae, the entrenchments of investigating and comprehending concepts that are driven in the Practical Philosophy field, of the selection, creation and employment of materials, activities and actions that are related with the development of a field. In a sense, the journal turns into a diary.

 In this 1^st issue, we itemize L.R.P.Ph.’s past activities (in the past, as Laboratory of Research on Practical & Applied Philosophy, L.R.P.A.Ph.) which have been developed during the academic year 2015-16, trying to show the element of slowness in building thoughts and beliefs, as, in a research way, we approach our thematics of interest.

The 1^st section, [Auditorium], includes theoretical texts that deal with the body as a concept and its philosophical comprehension on different levels (aesthetic, anthropological, ethical, historical, educational, phenomenological) in the wake of a scientific meeting that was organized by the L.R.P.Ph. in 2016, in an attempt to investigate the traces of the body in a series of action and praxis which slowly shape an understanding of Practical Philosophy, as it seems to be able to intergrate and reorganize them. This section will be a main part of the Amechanon Journal and will make attempts to bring such concepts or thematics into discussion which can be related to Practical Philosophy furthering and specializing this connection even more.

The 2^nd section [In the Laboratory] keeps track of the L.R.P.Ph. activities designed, in order to investigate the way in which research methods, employing philosophical ways, can possibly be structured for further use in public places (school, community) and for examining their applications’ results in correlation with the dynamic of their theoretical frame and their connection especially with the field of art.

The 3^rd section [Theories and Practices] includes some philosophical practices with children that have been developed outside the L.R.P.Ph.: bringing philosophy in the field of experience, through art and dialogue, once again posing the question of their possible interrelation with Practical Philosophy, if that is, and in which way they are traced to the field and in what way they form it.

Finally, the 4th section [Interviews] introduces a personal scientific path regarding philosophy – the way in which new ways are opened up, through the engagement with philosophy, both for philosophy and for the person doing it. In this section, there will be a systematization and intensification of the investigation into personal engagement with philosophy as a form of praxis.

Εκ τε γαρ ουδάμ’εόντος αμήχανόν εστι γενέσθαι

Και τα’εόν εξαπολέσθαι ανήνυστον και άπυστον^.

Αιεί γαρ τη γ’έσται, όπη κέ τις αιέν ερείδη

Eμπεδοκλέους, Απόσπ. 12 [Αριστοτέλης] Μ.Ξ.Γ. 2, 975b1

G.S.Kirk & J.E. Raven, M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers

Prof. Elena Theodoropoulou

Directress of L.R.P.Ph.

Dossier: «Thinking the body: philosophical approaches»

The section of Auditorium includes theoretical texts that deal each time with a concept or thematic which is considered to participate to the shaping of an understanding of practical philosophy, as it seems, inversely, to be able to intergrate and reorganize them. The aim is to bring such concepts or thematics into discussion, which could permit to progressively furthering and specializing their connection with the field of practical philosophy even more.

2016-2019

«Thinking the body: philosophical approaches»

More than the image, the status and the place of the body in the educational space and mechanism, the battle for or against the body-spirit duality, the transition between interiority and exteriority, the embodied and the experienced, the representation and the performance, the suffering and the pleasure, the connection between the beautiful and the ugly and the emergence of the monstrous, more than the biopolitics and the torture, the intercorporeality and the gaze, the mysteries of flesh and sensibility, the tension between distance and touch, more than the connection between gestures and speech, the poetics of here and there, life and death, more than the body of art, the poetics of movement and immobility, the mirror and the opacity, the ethics of the limit, the experience of cruelty, more than the nudity, the «thing» [res] and the dehumanization, the religious body and the ecstatic body, the visible limit between life and death, the wound and the earth of human substantiality – Rather a trap for the thinking. More than the body spectrum, the animal body and the body of carnival, the body construction and the body project, the body experienced, more than the material body and the desired body, more than the body mass, the body assembly, the body-object and the Cyborg and lesser than all these, what remains of the body, what is corporal, embodied, disembodied in education? What about its philosophical apprehension and how does this conveys the apperception and the inclusion of the body in the diverse experiences and forms of expression?

Ιn the wake of «Days of Workshops. Philosophy of Education in Praxis» [4th Meeting] under the theme «Philosophical Body / Body in education» (Rhodes, Rhodes, 26 -29 May) the texts included in this chapter understand the body from different points of view showing exactly on the one hand the tips on which strike the efforts of definition, on the other hand a peculiar openess which permits multiple approaches to its study. On anthropogical, educational, phenomenogical, socio-political, aesthetical, ethcial level, literally or metaphorically, the point of views ara multiplied stirring the question which for the education has still meaning, because the two poles exist equally: is the body the ultimate, unsurpassable reality (even with its own destruction) or agent of meaning is the beyond the body, the disembodied or the tug-of-war between the body and what it is not body, organizes the reason of our existence? A philosophy which will bring to light as a movement of their designation, the unspeakable or the untouchable by education, is the practical philosophy considered as the place of their reception and as her labor to be transformed to a such place – thus it will be recognized from its obstinate movement to the identification, the integration and the defence of mirabilia, of the irreducible, of the disorderd, the indisciplined (of the educational act), of those which behave obstinately like strangers either to philosophy (for example the body as such) or to education (for example, the body as a pedagogically unburned «rest» or as an eloquent sign of the educational order). In fact, philosophy has not been able to escape from the body, even if this appears as a ludibrium materiae and education has not been able to get rid of the body; even if it looses it behind its multiple decarnations.

Εlena Theodoropoulou
2016-2019

Philosophers did not neglect body

The body is often confined in its natural dimension if not in its physiological one. And it doesn’t find its place in a frame of study generally dedicated to cognitive activity. Or even, in France, a place is reserved exclusively for it in the case of «Athletic and Physical Activities» (APS). What follows is the old division of the body and spirit, that recurs incessantly in the framework of an uneven hierarchy in the very function of the institutions. I would like to support here that the problem is not to provide behind the body the position it deserves (how then, could we after all determine that position?) however to suggest a reevaluation of it. Nothing anyway is less certain, than the idea that we have that this division corresponds to something different than a social and historic construction of opinion. We refer for instance the work of Galen of Pergamon, who in the second century, didn’t consider that we can separate the soul from the body, connecting in this way all kind of illnesses of the body and soul with a bad idiosyncrasy of the body, in which they would have an effect upon. His treatise that the excellent doctor is also a philosopher provides for this a characteristic experience. In the same period, the Pyrrhonian impressions of Sextus Empiricus, develop a noteworthy presentation of the meaning that could be attributed to emotions (therefore to the body) in the framework of the cognitive activity, suggesting at the same time a philosophy as a way of life (education) and a premature ethology. As far as Spinoza is concerned there is no doubt: «The spirit and the body is one in itself» Ethics, ΙΙΙ, 2nd sent.), he confirms clarifying in the following: «No one until now has determined what the body can do». Deleuze from his side, stressed this point (for example in his the book about Spinoza, Practical Philosophy), which I would like to read ab initio in the framework of education. Not what I can teach? Rather what can the body do? It is a radical acknowledgement of the presupposition. Beginning not just from the transcendental recommendations of the institution of the state, but rather from the innate results of the experience. We don’t know what the body can do (its power to endure and act), and more generally what can the bodies do (in their crossing with one another) – therefore we must experiment. Does this mean to learn to write? The question is it not: what shall I teach? Rather: what can I do inside the relationship with this «language» which is the writing. A relationship henceforth «socialized», in a way that for someone to write is expressed as a «sentiment» of writing. This presupposes a practice of free writing, with continuance and social recognition, in that way that the writing become a «spiritual exercise», as Pierre Hadot would say ∙ not an activity of institutional normalization but rather a philosophical or existential action. Not a scholar (or scholastic) activity, but a transformation of the self. Study becomes a social experiment in which everyone investigates and expands that of which he/she is capable, according to two principles: the confirmation of equality (Rancière) and the practice of joy.

Keywords: «what can the body do?», experience, writing, confirmation of equality, practice of joy.

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The physiology of the subject: a symbolism for the eye

According to Nietzsche, the modern philosophical conception of the construction of identity from Descartes to Hegel seems to assume that the primacy of the thinking subject (or of consciousness), constitutes a unitary field or substratum which determines and upholds the existence of the world. Counter opposed to this perspective, Nietzsche holds that the «subject» is nothing but a fiction founded on that kind of faith which is useful for life but nonetheless remains an interpretation. As such, the «subject» constitutes a fiction and not an absolute fact or truth. For him the timely confirmation of the «Ego’s» identity furnishes the «subject» with individuality: the subject is nothing but the timely the finite passage of the moment. In Nietzsche the conception of the subject «as multiplicity» is so precise that it does not permit margins for metaphysical consolation or peace. On the contrary, it exposes one to dionysian excess the very excess of dionysian life that dismembers us. Nietzsche contends that thought – as interpretation – is an activity undertaken not by a unitary «subject» but by a much more subtle and complex interplay of drives and forces of domination that in unison, constitute the phenomenon of the living body.

Keywords: Nietzsche, «subject as multiplicity», living body, timely experience, thinking as praxis.

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Βοdy in arts. Mimetic and performative processus.

To a great extent, cultural learning is mimetic learning, which is at the center of many processes of education and self-education. Mimetic learning is a sensory, body-based form of learning in which images, schemas and movements needed to perform actions are learned. This embodiment is responsible for the lasting effects that play an important role in all social and cultural fields. By participating in the living practices of other people, humans expand their own life-worlds and create for themselves new ways of experiencing and acting. Receptivity and activity overlap. In all areas of human existence rituals and gestures are important for the mimetic development of body knowledge. Embodied knowledge is indispensable in religion, politics, economy, science, families, and education. Ritual knowledge facilitates both continuity and change, as well as experiences of transition and transcendence.

Keywords: mimetic learning, embodied knowledge, sensory, body-based form of learning, ritual knowledge.

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The Other, the same (?) in Biotech Art. The example of SymbioticA and the Tissue Culture & Art Project.

In 1996, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr create Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC & A) and found SymbioticA around a research and development project on the use of tissue technologies as an artistic medium. This first research laboratory brings together scientists and artists who comment on and explore the possibilities of biotechnology. We propose in this article to present some of the semi-living sculptures of the couple of artists who, through a new class of objects / being, questions the relationship between Human and environment.

Keywords: Biotech Art, tissue culture, ethics, sciences.

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Theater and philosophy, body and thinking.

This text explores the relationship between body and thinking, and between theater and philosophy as well. It gives some notes on how to conceive philosophy, as practice, pathos and relationship to knowledge and it offers three characteristics of what could be considered the educational dimension of such a practice: invention, errancy and improvisation. It also provides an example of a concrete technique adopted from the Brazilian theater intellectual A. Boal and explores its connections with some philosophical exercises in order to explicit and problematize the connections between philosophical practice and theater and more specifically between body and thinking.

Keywords: theater, body, philosophical practice, A. Boal, philodrama.

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The place of the body in education: the challenge of self-presence.

Hardly a day goes by that media do not remind us of the benefits of physical activity in favor of our wellbeing and to counter the adverse effects of the modern world. We would like to bring out what we can think about the place of the body in education by valuing physical and motor activities. The contribution of phenomenology and hermeneutics can give a perspective on these physical practices. We shall use the thought of Heidegger to illustrate the passage from free activity toward activity connected to expectations of results highlighting the transformation of the playful character of these activities. We shall wonder if there exists a relation of truth to the body.

Keywords: Body, education, relation to oneself, Heidegger, play, nature, ethics.

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Travel-School And The Thinking Body: the place of intensities in a non-structured thinking.

If we think about school not as a place for learning or socialization, not as a place to insert people in a society or in a cultural logic, but more than that, as a place to amaze, to surprise – and if we do believe that thinking comes out of an encounter with difference, as Deleuze stated, we are thus speaking about school as a specific place for thinking –, in that sense we can relate what happens within school to what happens in a travel. In this article, is not the relevance of this travel-school possibility that is put under discussion, but more specifically the place of the body in this school of thinking. How is it possible to think in displacement? How can we amaze or surprise our body? Can the body think?

Keywords: body, travel, cartography, difference.

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«Ι eat my notebook»: for an anthropophagic philosophy of education.

This text explores the pedagogical dimension of the Anthropophagy of Oswald de Andrade. We try to show how Anthropophagy — as a platform of a philosophy of education, a «cultural theory» or a «program for the re-education of sensibility» — is also a pedagogy of the body and a struggle against the patriarchy, the venality and the usury of capitalism.

Keywords: Education, Anthropophagic pedagogy, Body.

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«The physical body is not here but the Body of Memories is still with us»: Philosophy with Children and the Living Body of Memory of the Deceased.

A philosophy with children community of inquiry encourages children to develop a philosophical sensitivity that entails awareness of abstract questions related to human existence. When it operates, it can allow insight into significant philosophical aspects of various situations and their analysis. This article offers a hermeneutic perspective to the discussions of children and adolescents during philosophical communities of inquiry around their attitude towards their deceased family members. The analysis of the texts reveals that the young members of the communities referred to the deceased through three main categories, all related to the body: (1) The «living memory body of the dead person»; (2) The «un-present body that accompanied me»; (3) The meaning of «life after death». This article uses some aspects of narrative theory in order to explain the statements of the participants.

Keywords: philosophy with children, community of inquiry, body, living memory, deceased.

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Childlike bodies and adult spirits

The anthropology of education cannot be reduced into an anthropology encoded in biology, it is equally and above all, a cultural anthropology (dedicated to the societal forms of life and human practices) and a philosophical anthropology (concentrated on the meaning of human life). If the physical is what is produced in its own order, man is something more than a piece of nature, exactly because it is a part of nature that declares what is nature. The body itself, a body experienced, phenomenological, comes to increase the societal body, which in turn comes to increase the biological body. It is from this clumsy and incomplete encapsulation that emerges the anthropological mystery of the human. Thus, we propose the study of the representation of the child body in relation with the childhood representations in the West, namely the observation of the socially structured body of the child through the prism of an anthropology of education.

Keywords: anthropology of education, cultural anthropology, body experienced-social body, childhood representations.

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Ethics against racism

The body, in education, has a dual status, to be the medium and to be the training project of the individual. One can educate only by the sensitive, which makes it suspicious to the powers that want to subjugate it. In this paper, we analyze how corporeality can be turned against itself by institutions of domination so that self-hatred becomes hatred of the other. Racism can no longer be portrayed as an embarrassing epiphenomenon anchored in the heart of a guilty humanity, but as a structure implementing new techniques of governmentality. The research is based on a historical and philosophical characterization of racism as a state apparatus under the third Reich. It then proposes a characterization of the lines of force of a pedagogy against racism, based on the fundamental postulate of the equality of intelligences.

Keywords: Body, education, racism, emancipation pedagogy.

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The body and the experience of intensity in autism

The purpose of this paper is to think the idea of difference from gestures and crisis by autistic subjects. If the difference is conflated with negation and opposition (as Gilles Deleuze points out in Difference and Repetition) and if it is misunderstood in an educational context, it can lead to the unbearable exclusion of autistic children from school. It is possible to think the difference in other ways. If we base an analysis on the body and its movements, and on the nature of the crisis and on stereotypies of autistic behaviour, we can move away from an idea of the difference understood as operating according to a logic of the Similar, or the likeness to oneself. This logic we will term the identiquement. Seen from an autistic point of view, the difference is elsewhere; it is in the self as a modality, or as the condition of an experience. This we call the mêmement. It can be thought of as an experience in the moment of the intensity of the seizure. To understand the moment, it is necessary to examine what we will call the instansité of this difference- in the sense that, if the ‘difference’ in autism can be described, it must be described in terms of a difference in intensity. Renewing the philosophy of difference, as it relates to autism, therefore requires new conceptual thinking; in this paper, we present the first draft of a new conceptual approach.

Keywords: Autism, Philosophie of the Difference, Deleuze, body, experience.

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The Section In the Laboratory keeps track of the L.R.P.Ph. activities designed, in order to investigate the way in which research methods, employing philosophical ways, can possibly be structured for further use in public places (as they are here, the school and the community) and for examining their applications’ results in correlation with the dynamic of their theoretical frame and their connection especially with the field of art. 

«Artistic & Philosophical Practices to Change School? (PHILARPE)»

Ι. The Artistic Residency and the «Phantom- vessel»

October 17 – November 6, 2016

Presentation

As part of the research project «Artistic & Philosophical Practices to Change School? (PHILARPE)», with scientifically and organizationally responsible the Laboratory «Education, Cultures, Politics» (ECP, University of Lumière Lyon2) & the «Laboratory of Research on Practical Philosophy» (L.R.P.Ph.) / University of the Aegean & collaborating partner the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts artistic residency was planned, in collaboration with the Directorate of Secondary Education of Dodecanesos and the Municipality of Leros (see //practphilab.aegean.gr/φιλοσοφικές-διεπιστημονικές-πρακτικ/).

The objects and the practices that PHILARPE expects to disclose and to analyze, are placed at the crossroads of art, philosophy and education, as well as those of art and philosophy within education (and vice versa). PHILARPE proposes to correlate artistic and philosophical practices in light of the question about their common stakes, their formative influence on the educational environment and their ability to educate differently, notably to «change school». This perspective is systematically supported by art education – the intervening artist constitutes here a central figure. The same analysis can be made with regard to the development of philosophical practice as a generalized educational practice, even though the figure of the «intervening philosopher» remains rarer and tradition tends to connect philosophy to the development of cognitive and ethical-political skills and to the shaping of an active citizen. Placed at the intersection of these two areas considered as levers of educational change, PHILARPE is enrolled in a european and international trend and perspective.

More specifically, it is about the installation of an original mechanism of artistic and philosophical intervention on the islands of Dodocanese, as part of the research carried out by the two cooperating laboratories, starting from Leros. The animators invite the participants to think and give shape together in one of the most widespread myths that fuel the island imaginary: the phantom- ship myth.

At the end of the artistic and philosophical residence, an original work, a collective creation, will be installed at the emblematic site which will have been chosen as the trace of the phantom ship’s passage. This phase is integrated in the framework of the 4th cycle of «Days of Workshops» (May 26-29, 2016) organized by the «Research Laboratory in Practical & Applied Philosophy» (L.R.P.A.Ph) and the International Network «Philosophy of Education in Praxis»(NePhedinPrax).

The action is illustrated in the text of Alain Kerlan & Yves Henri: «For Art, Philosophy, and Education as a ‘Performance’, October 17-November 6, 2016» [«De L’art, de la Philosophie et de l’Education Comme ‘Performance’»], October 17 – November 6, 2016.

It is accompanied by an extended summary of the text in Greek.

Elena Theodoropoulou

2016 – 2019

In the Laboratory

«Artistic & Philosophical Practices to Change School? (PHILARPE)»

The Artistic Residency and the «Phantom- vessel». October 17-November 6, 2016

For Art, Philosophy, and Education as a «Performance». The Leros «Phantom-Vessel», October 17-November 6, 2016. Chronicle of an artistic, philosophical and pedagogical experimentation.

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«Artistic & Philosophical Practices to Change School? (PHILARPE)»

ΙΙ. Child, photography, philosophy

19, 20 February & 25 May 2016

Presentation

As part of the research project «Artistic & Philosophical Practices to Change School? (PHILARPE)», the «Laboratory of Research on Practical & Applied Philosophy» (L.R.P.A.Ph.) / University of the Aegean, organized a workshop & a procedure of artistic and philosophical intervention (with the participation of students of 1^st Experimental Elementary School of Rhodes) in relation to photography were organized, in 19 & 20 February 2016.

The recognition of photography as a philosophical object is proposed here, as a process of attempting to understand and partially remove the obstacles, at the same time, both from the point of view of photography, to be seen as such, and from the point of view of philosophy, to contemplate, compose and reconstruct its relationship to photography. On the basis of the above reasoning, the organization of a second workshop, this time in a classroom setting is attempted.

The children and the participants had the opportunity to think, to express themselves and discuss about the photographs which they had been asked to select based on different areas of interest. The reasons for the selection of photographs and the relevant discussion can pinpoint the «philosophy of an image» that permeates the photos as well as the basic philosophical notions found within, while, at the same time, the particularity of this medium through the viewpoint of children will become apparent. What makes the photo what it is, but, at the same time, what it is not and what makes it to turn out to a philosophical object?

In this framework, further questions that arise when we want to think of photography in the context of an «image philosophy» in its anthropological, philosophical and aesthetic potential were developed. [The first phase of these workshops was conducted in the frame of the International Symposium, «Ethics in Education. Philosophical tracings and clearings», and of the Days of Workshops, «Philosophy of Education in Praxis» /3rd International Meeting (Rhodes, May 12-13-14, 2015 //practphilab.aegean.gr/συνέδρια-συμπόσια-ημερίδες-congres-colloques-journees-congresses-colloquia-c/).

The collective product of the collaboration with children and with the collaboration of students of the Department of Preschool Education and Educational Design (D.P.E.S.E.D.) was included in the framework of the 2nd Exhibition «Philosophical Objects» which was organized by L.R. P. PH. (May 25, 2016, http://practphilab.
aegean.gr/φιλοσοφalia-philosophalia/).

The above is described through the following texts:

– Alain Kerlan: «La Photographie Comme Objet Philosophique Et Porte D’entrée Dans La Réflexion Philosophique. Intervention Dans La Classe, Suivie D’un Séminaire A L’université. Le Dispositif». [Photography As a Philosophical Object. Intervention In the Classroom & door of Entrance in philosophical thinking: the plan of process].

– Elena Theodoropoulou: «Photography in classroom: the discussional processus and the object of thought».

The texts are accompanied by the video: «The phantom- vessel, From Philosophical Object to the Object of Aesthetics» (Phase 2) [https://youtu.be/cwem6x6PN5g] in the framework of «Days of Workshops», Philosophy of Education in Praxis (4th International Meeting) «Philosophical Body/Body in Education», 26-29 / 05/2016 organized by the «Laboratory of Research in Practical & Applied Philosophy (L.R.PA.Ph.)». It is an outdoor workshop, organized on May 28 from the R.L.PA.PH. as conclusion of the above collaboration with the Sixth Class of 1st Experimental School of Rhodes (animators: Philosophy Professor Alain Kerlan and visual artist Yves Henri). The workshop has been attended by school children of the last class of the 1^st Experimental School, with the kind support of their teacher, the school director and their parents.

Elena Theodoropoulou

2016 – 2019

Photography As a Philosophical Object. Intervention In the Classroom & door of Entrance in philosophical thinking: the plan of process.

Based on the acceptance that photography is a «royal way» for the children’s initiation to philosophy, the text presents, on the one hand, the mechanism set up to develop a discussion with children in 6th grade of an Elementary school, and on the other hand, the theoretical context, philosophical dimensions of photography, so that a workshop with a group of students at the university can then be organized on the themes that the discussion with children had brought to light. The philosophical and pedagogical key questions that posed in the workshop were: why is photography an ideal way for us to do philosophy with children? And how can we go to a such entreprise?

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Photography in classroom: the discussional process and the object of thought

The text follows the steps of a discussion among children in a primary school classroom on photography. Among the steps of such an observation are the following: discussion modalities, pedagogical mechanism, non-directive and non-thematic approach of photography, the main philosophical lines, the development of children thinking, the constitution of a map of criteria for the lecture of photos by the children by releasing its philosophy, the of deterritorialization, the understanding of photography as a philosophical object and the meta-object produced by children in the wake of previous discussions in classroom.

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Τhe project Ou-tis [No-body], aims to represent a meeting point for those educators who are interested in observation, identification, highlighting and trial of the forms and ways through which philosophy in school, exists or is likely to exist πwhere educators tend to use prefabricated «practices» and educational materials, in order to serve goals (didactic, pedagogical etc.) alien to philosophy or pseudo-philosophical goals. The recognition of philosophical traces and the excavation of philosophical debris, moving unseen or transformed or deformed within the educational environments are numbered among the goals. Conversely, the identification and examination of pedagogical tissues within philosophical speeches, ways and places. Exploring the possibility to cultivate common or hybrid or circularized forms or ways that will not skimp on the needs of both fields runs through the pedagogical activities in and out the school which are organized around the school classroom as their center of interest.

Within the above-mentioned framework, a certain investigation takes place, as far as primary school grades are concerned, which would be interested to discover points of coarticulation between the philosophical and the pedagogical level depending on a possible understanding that the educator gains while he/she attempts to coordinate different, yet convergent within the classroom, dynamics through an ever-advancing realization of their interplay: that of the literary text, of the children regarded as debaters, of the school curriculum’s demands, of the consolidated technics and methods, of the educator’s own pedagogical-didactic habits, of the philosophical perspective, of the existing pedagogical-didactic culture.

On this basis, an examination took place which concerned the possibility of activating probational guidelines/ red lines, commitments so to speak, regarding a self-observation process and exercise in the classroom which would attempt to be integrated precisely at the framework’s dynamic. These guidelines would support the educator’s possible choices without them getting distanced from the basic commitments, both those concerning the philosophical education, and those concerning the pedagogical management of the terms of classroom discussion, as they respond to the principle of a question-centered approach of the didactic process, with what ever that goes with in terms of principles, method, technics, procedural choices, values, making good use of the related literature.

This section includes four articles. The first one draws the basic lines of the theoretical frame and the remaining three attempt to list observations and comments related to the applications attempted.

– Elena Theodoropoulou: «Detection in classroom: texts, discussions and philosophical fragments – the emergence of a research».

– Maiiri Voukanou: «Discussing a children’s literature text in the classroom: traces of a research activity».

– Μania Monioudi: «Debating with children in primary school as a means of redefining the educator’s attitude: Notes of reflective self/observation».

– Aikaterini Renti: «”I will help you to approach if you approach, and to keep away if you keep away”: Observing the potential advent of philosophy in a classroom, through a literary text».

Elena Theodoropoulou

2016-2019

Detection in classroom: texts, discussions and philosophical fragments – the emergence of a research

Through the disagreements, incompatibilities, arrythmias, deviations, recessions appearing during the co-function of those dynamics created where the teaching of literature meets philosophy and discussion (or discussion meets literature and philosophy) emerges in fact the intention of an exploration which will be able to reveal the minor places where these meetings manifest themselves (directly or indirectly) not in order to establish the right of a didactic object (like philosophy is) to claim the application of the presuppositions appropriated to its introduction and exercise in education, but mainly, the right not to be articulated as a major didactic choice contenting henceforth itself with the demand of a minor but critical attention to detail.

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Discussing a children’s literature text in the classroom: traces of a pre-research activity

The main theme of this article is presenting elements and comments in the context of a self-observation οn behalf of the teacher during the progress of conversation among primary school children with an intermediate literary material. In the frame of the activities of the Laboratory of Research in Practical Philosophy (L.R.P.Ph.), this article is about a pre-research activity in classroom, where main emphasis is placed on less intervention of the pedagogical presence, on the part of the teacher, in order to identify potentially well-established characteristics of the pedagogical culture that do not enhance children’s thinking free expression.

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Debating with children in primary school as a means of redefining the educator’s attitude: Notes of reflective self/observation

Debating with children in primary school can constitute «a place and a way» of reflecting on the attitude of the teacher, when formal educational settings incorporate pedagogical methods of a different culture (e.g. the culture cultivated as part of studying under the Practical Philosophy Research Lab). The notes on this specific «reflective observation» concern the recording of personal experiences during targeted discussions with students and within a framework of binding condition as well as pointing out the difficulties that were identified both during the discussions and (mainly) later, in any reflective approach to these discussions.

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«I will help you to approach if you approach, and to keep away if you keep away»: Observing the potential advent of philosophy in a classroom, through a literary text

In this text, data from the study of a hypothetical scenario about the observation that took place during the course of Modern Greek in a primary school classroom are introduced. During the lesson a literature text was analyzed as well. On that basis, we are trying to highlight a concern related not only to the connection between literature and philosophy in the classroom, but also to the question whether a teacher can «meet» his/her students and discuss concepts that have philosophical interest.

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The Section Theories and Practices includes some philosophical practices with children that have been developed outside the L.R.P.Ph.: bringing philosophy in the field of experience, through art and dialogue, once again posing the question of their possible interrelation with Practical Philosophy, if that is, and in which way they are traced to the field and in what way they form it.

What a child can?

This article is about a philosophical reflection on a Portuguese artist’s work, a choreographer, during a specific creative process that was culminated in a show titled, «What if everything was yellow?». This show was developed by the artist, from the scratch, in co-creation with a group of children. The article intends to analyze the way in which the artist departed from the usual conception about childhood, according to which children’s ideas must be judged as right or wrong (depending on the adult-centered perspective), in order to, progressively, arrive to a conception open to the new, the unpredictable, the unexpected – in that way, a new creative potential recognized in children’s thinking. This work developed, not only within an artistic plane, but also a philosophical one, through the introduction of philosophical encounters – the artist continued to participate as a screenwriter, always in co-creation with the children involved in the process. Consequently, this article aims to show this very connection between these two levels, inasmuch the contamination that occurred between the artistic work and the philosophical one.

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Εxperiences and enchantment during a school excursion to the university

This text narrates an experience in the context of «Does philosophy fit into boxes?» project (in cooperation with the Philosophy and Childhood Studies Program (NEFI / UERJ) of Rio de Janeiro State University, with two public schools near the city of Rio de Janeiro). Ιn this particular university they are systematically organized workshops with students and teachers from schools of preschool and primary education and young people and adults as well studying in night schools. In this case, it’s about the visit to the university on behalf of 25 children from 9 to 11 years old. The objective of this visit would be a joint reflection attempt, an experiment of philosophical experience in an unknown space for the children. In this experience, starting from an heraclitean fragment, a discussion was developed about friendship, emerged from a question formuladed by these kids themselves: «How do you take care of a friend?». The dialogue traced an unthinkable connexion with the Deulezian thought, what gives rise to a reflexion about the value and the meaning to do philosophy childishly in the frame of a university level project.

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The Section Interviews introduces a personal scientific path regarding philosophy – the way in which new ways are opened up, through the engagement with philosophy, both for philosophy and for the person doing it. In this section, there will be a systematization and intensification of the investigation into personal engagement with philosophy as a form of praxis.

Ιnterviewer: Dr. Sofia Nikolidaki (M.Ed. University of Crete, MPhil, University of Crete/ Ph.D, University of Wales)

Frame of the interview: Days of Workshops «Philosophy of Education in Praxis» [4th International Meeting]

 Philosophical Body/ Body in Education, 26-29 May 2016.

In this frame, prof. Santi had presented a workshop under the title: «Embodiment in the unexpected: improvisation as form of developmental ‘complex thinking’».                                                                                              

Transcript: Elizabeth Giamakidou (M. Ed., University of Nicosia)

Reviewing of the transcript: prof. Elena Theodoropoulou

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