ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the potential role of communal philosophical dialogue in the emergence of a culture of social democracy, a term (after J. Dewey) that describes those shared habits of sentiment, mind and ethical conviction that make authentic political democracy possible, and which suggest what H. Marcuse called a “new sensibility” and E. Fromm a particular form of “social character”. I will suggest that the form of educational practice that arose concomitantly with the “invention” of democracy in ancient Greece, known as “skholé”, provides us with an institutional prototype for the cultivation of democratic sensibilities based on a form intergenerational encounter grounded in dialogue and informed by what F. Schiller called the “play drive”. This encounter is epitomized in the regular practice of a form of deep play known as “community of philosophical inquiry” (CPI). The chapter applies five analytic criteria – space, time, rules, “stakes” and power – drawn from seven major play theorists that mark the structural dynamics of CPI in the educational context of skholé as an inherently democratic discursive form and a primary building block of the democratic sensibility.
