ABSTRACT
When we participate in a Philosophy for Children (P4C) class, we can improve or make progress in several different ways. We can develop as critical and creative thinkers, we can improve at thinking together and conducting a Community of Inquiry, and we can construct and discover better philosophical insights as a result of our inquiry. In this chapter I focus on the last kind of progress, which I call epistemic philosophical progress. It is epistemic because it is about getting better ideas, insights or understandings (rather than getting better skills or procedures, or developing greater maturity), and it is philosophical because it is about getting better philosophical ideas by addressing philosophical problems and questions, using philosophical methods (rather than scientific, economic, psychological or historical progress). For the rest of this chapter I will use ‘epistemic philosophical progress’ and ‘epistemic progress in P4C’ interchangeably.
