ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Jennifer Glaser focuses on two figures who influenced Sharp’s thinking about the normative social and political dimensions of Philosophy for Children: John Dewey and Hannah Arendt. For Dewey, a public is formed when people assume an identity as a group by virtue of common interests. Philosophical method anchored in human experience then constitutes a means through which a public can assess and reconstruct itself toward the common good. This method involves critical evaluation and “intelligent sympathy,” toward another’s experience. Arendt called for a method of philosophical inquiry that is anchored in worldliness or love of the world, thereby saving philosophy from the dual dangers of abstraction and partisan interest. Arendt’s notion of natality also informed Sharp’s view of the community of inquiry as a generative space in which attention to the particular finds expression in a form of enlarged thinking essential to the political and moral recognition of others. This is captured in Sharp’s use of Arendt’s metaphor of “going visiting,” which inspired her notion of aesthetic judgment as a political form of action. Glaser concludes that to fully realize the community of inquiry’s capacity to educate for deliberative democracy, action within the community of inquiry must transform into action outside it, engaging students as change agents in their own communities and the world, thereby broadening our conception of the public sphere of the community of inquiry.
