Philip Cam has been an inspiration to me in his approach to Philosophy for Children, and I have tried to follow the trail he blazed. He is a master of developing what I call ‘practitioner theories’ of Philosophy for Children. These are practical theories designed to be useful for practitioners of Philosophy for Children, rather than abstract theories designed to contribute to the scholarship of Philosophy for Children. I first explain what I mean by a practitioner theory, using Cam’s Question (...) Quadrant as an illustration. Then, for the rest of the article I give a more detailed analysis and elaboration of Cam’s practitioner theory about assessing thinking. This theory first appears in Thinking Together in the form of a table that teachers can use to assess how frequently their students perform different thinking moves. For example, we can assess student thinking based on how often they ask questions, or build on what someone else has said. I will show how this seemingly simple theory captures a great deal of theoretical complexity, combining themes about thinking moves from Splitter and Sharp, making thinking visible from Perkins and Richhart, and habits of mind from Costa and Kallick. I will also show how we can develop Cam’s practitioner theory into a sharper tool for assessing thinking if we incorporate further insights about learning to think, and assessing thinking, from Perkins, Dewey, Piaget, Vygotsky and Bloom. (shrink)

In contemporary philosophy about justice, a contrast between empirical and transcendental approaches can be identified. Hillel Steiner represents an empirical approach: he argues for building an account of justice-as-rights out of the minimal inductive material of psychological linguistic and moral intuitions. From this opening, he ultimately concludes that persons have original rights to self-ownership and to an initially equal share of natural resources. Emmanuel Levinas represents a transcendental approach: he argues that justice arises from a transcendent ethical relation of responsibility-for-the-Other. (...) This relation underpins all subjective cognition, and makes rationality, reasoning, and rights possible.Analysis of each of these positions reveals certain problems. On the one hand, Steiner’s argument contains a number of latent methodological, conceptual, and structural presuppositions. These include the pretheoretical concepts of “person”, “equality”, and “consistency”. These presuppositions prefigure and condition the conclusions which Steiner reaches. On the other hand, Levinas fails to provide a convincing account of how the self comes to be an object of my own deliberations about morality and justice. This amounts to an annihilation of the subject which undermines his argument for the subject as a site of responsible action. As Steiner identifies, justice encompasses equal moral agents. Levinas’s hyperbolic description of the ethical relation’s asymmetry must therefore be revised.Nevertheless, what remains is the strength of Levinas’s argument for the priority of the ethical relation over thematization, rationality, and consciousness. The hidden presuppositions supporting Steiner’s work are evidence of Levinas’s plausibility in this respect. Steiner’s account of justice-as-rights requires a prior ethical relation in which we recognise one another as separate persons, each possessing an ethical status of their own; an attitude of justice motivates Steiner’s description of justice. This attitude is evident in language, which is communication before it is thought. In that individual rights can be conceived only on the basis of a relation of responsibility, rights are primordially the rights of the Other. (shrink)