Recommended by IAPC The following are P4C literature designed for children. Every chapter of each book is written in a simple and clear language of a 10-year-old. pixie-novelDownload mark-novelDownload elfie-novelDownload These are the academic readings for those who are interested in the methodology and theories of P4C (It might be helpful to take a closer look at the parts that I highlighted): demarzio_whathappensinphilosophicaltextsDownload kennedy_dialogic-schoolingDownload kennedy_five-communitiesDownload ..read more

Philosophy is usually introduced into the college curriculum in the United States. A growing number of high schools are including philosophy in their curriculum, often as part of special literature courses for college-bound students. Philosophy is much more common in the high school curriculum in Europe and many other countries. Philosophy before high school, on the other hand, appears to be relatively uncommon around the world. This could imply that serious philosophical thought is not appropriate for pre-adolescents. According to Jean Piaget’s (1933) well-known theory of cognitive developmen ..read more

Around the world, every nation seems to have its own representative animal or culture media which stands for the notion of the country itself: Australia—kangaroo, Thailand—white elephant, and China—panda.  However, in ancient China, the Chinese dragon and phoenix—abstract animals—were the country’s symbols. Chinese dragon and phoenix represent respectively emperor and empress in Chinese culture since the Han dynasty (202 B.C.E—220 C.E). And the difference in gender meaning brought by the Chinese dragon and phoenix leads to the social construction of male and female, on which even the empe ..read more

According to the Oxford Dictionary, Taoism refers to “a Chinese philosophy based on the writings of Lao-tzu, advocating humility and religious piety.” Taoism has both a philosophical and a religious aspect. Philosophical Taoism emphasizes inner contemplation and mystical union with nature; wisdom, learning, and purposive action should be abandoned in favor of simplicity and wu-wei (non-action, or letting things take their natural course). Taoism’s religious aspects emerged later, around the third century AD, incorporating Buddhist elements and developing a monastic system. When Chinese pe ..read more

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) Basic information: Michel Foucault was a French philosopher. His work is best described as philosophically oriented historical research; at the end of his life, he believed that all of his work was part of a single mission of historically researching the formation of truth. Foucault attempted to give a historical account of the genesis of ideas, including philosophical concepts, in his main writings. He was always looking for a method to comprehend the ideas that form our present not just in terms of their historical function but also in terms of how that function h ..read more

The Matrix is one of my favorite movies. It tells a story that when a beautiful stranger leads computer hacker Neo to a forbidding underworld, Neo discovers the shocking truth–the life he knows is the elaborate deception of an evil cyber-intelligence. I like this movie not only because of its well-designed plotline but also because it raises a philosophical question to the audience: what is the difference between dream and reality? Epistemological skepticism is a philosophical viewpoint that holds that we cannot know anything for certain–for example, we cannot know if we live in our dream or r ..read more

Rationalism is a broad term that encompasses a wide range of ideologies, all of which share the belief that human reason can offer definitive solutions to the most fundamental philosophical questions. In ancient times, famous rationalists included Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Some examples of modern rationalists are René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. They all thought that philosophical reasoning may provide solutions, and that these solutions are all necessary truths that may be discovered inside our own thinking processes. Experi ..read more

Hume proposes that we have no reason to think that the sun will rise tomorrow, that the lights will turn on when we turn on the switch, or that smoking causes cancer, since every argument for these conclusions starts with a premise that we have no reason to believe in. However, his argument has been challenged in many ways. First of all, why do we need to use the same criteria applied to deductions for inductions? Valid inferences are infallible—when the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. But why shouldn’t there be good inferences—inferences that justify their conclusions—that are ..read more

UN (according to John Stuart Mill, the principle of the uniformity of nature): If all observed Fs are G, then all Fs are G.Therefore, the transformed deductive argument is the following; In a large sample, all observed Fs are G. If all observed Fs are G, then all Fs are G. ______________________________ All Fs are G. Each of the premises of a deductive argument, including our UN, must be justified for the argument to be valid. However, philosopher David Hume demonstrates that the UN is not justified as true, no matter how natural it seems to be. We may readily conceive that what you haven’t no ..read more

A ..read more