Philosophy and Community

Theories, Practices and Possibilities

Amanda Fulford, Grace Lockrobin, Richard Smith

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350260986
• eBook ISBN: 9781350073425
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

'Why should we care about philosophy?' Public philosophy, or 'doing philosophy' in the community, is an important and growing trend – revealed not only by the phenomenon of the Parisian philosophy café, but also the contemporary rise of multiple grassroots projects, for example the Philosophy in Pubs movement. This book is the first to offer academic examination of the theoretical contributions and practical applications of community philosophy. Bringing together voices from diverse contexts and subject areas, from activism and political action to religious environments, arts organisations and museums to maximum security prisons, this collection asks key questions about the point of making philosophy available for everyone: 'How do you "do philosophy" with the public?'; 'Is philosophy in the community the same as academic philosophy?'; 'Why is community philosophy important?' Including contributions from practitioners and researchers from professional philosophy, education, healthcare, and community philosophy, this collection offers perspectives on a growing area of study. It offers a timely and critical introduction to, and analysis of, what philosophy can be when grounded in socially-engaged activities.

Part One

Philosophy and Community: Theories

1

Understanding philosophy in communities: The spaces, people, politics and philosophy of Community Philosophy

Steve Bramall

Socrates was the first to call philosophy down from the heavens and to place it in cities, and even to introduce it into homes and compel it to inquire about life and standards and goods and evils. (Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tusculan ­Disputations V.10-11)

Introduction: How we philosophize

Always and everywhere, philosophers of all stripes have practised with others in philosophical communities. Ancient Athens had its many schools; India had orthodox and heterodox schools; China, the ‘Hundred Schools’. In hindsight, we look back and skim off the best of what remains from these communal practices. We take out and take on the ideas, the questions, positions and challenges. We extract and apply the arguments, analyses and reflections. We sift out the methods and tease out the methodologies. We employ these intellectual goods to interrogate ourselves; use them to form and challenge our thinking; call on them to reconstruct our knowledge; improve our methods and generate our understandings. We enter disembodied conversations that transcend space, culture, language and time.

This engagement with philosophical histories is selective and abstracting. We choose a few outstanding thinkers and writers to stand for groups and traditions, to represent ideas and exemplify positions. There’s too much to include all the small stuff and the detail, so what we want are the big questions from the big thinkers. But philosophy, as a history of big ideas and big thinkers, is a pretty thin account, and it can give a misleading view of what lived philosophy is like and how it works. A thicker history of philosophy would tell multiple stories, big and small, from particular voices, about groups of people coming together, sharing spaces, developing common interests, building collaborative relationships and growing social sentiments. A thicker history of philosophy would be a many-tongued history of groups of people finding ways of thinking together. And finding ways of thinking together means finding ways of being together. A history of philosophy as social practice would weave together the places, people, politics and philosophy into a holistic account: a story of the where and the who and the how and the why of our communal philosophical thinking.

Being together and thinking together, a complex unified practice, is how philosophy in communities is experienced. And being and thinking together means that communities of philosophers, particularly in their early days, need to make practical decisions. They must decide where to be, how to attract, who’s in and who’s out, how to get started, what to talk about, what their purposes are, what to do about food and drink and money and getting on and falling out. All raise philosophical questions; all affect the quality of thinking.

The social, spatial and political dimensions of philosophical practice can be seen in accounts of all contemporary grass-roots philosophy groups. The Café Philo movement in Paris in the 1990s saw Marc Sautet trial his brand of philosophy for communities with different sets of participants and spaces, before he hit upon the popular formulation of ‘café pour Socrates’, at the Café De Flores. In the 1990s in the United States, Christopher Phillips, founder of ‘Socrates Cafés’, found that they work best in public spaces like public squares or libraries, as ‘some people, particularly homeless people, are put off by cafés’ (Phillips 2002 quoted in Evans 2012: 42).

Where practice is more established, the social, spatial and political decisions require less attention, but are, whether explicit or not, integral to practice. Professional philosophers in modern universities have developed accepted ways of going about their business, but university philosophy is communal, social and political. It has established traditions pertaining to the use of space, indicators of success and how people get involved. It comprises communities of teachers, scholars and researchers who pool their varied knowledge, expertise, enthusiasms and commitments in the pursuit of good thinking and arguing. It proceeds according to particular, though contested, conceptions of philosophy.

So we might say that the practice of philosophy, whether in ancient China, the University of Chicago or a Paris café, is by nature communal, just as surely as it is by nature linguistic and conceptual. But if this is the case, that all philosophy involves communities of particular people in particular places, doing philosophical things together that bring about changes, then what is distinctive about philosophy in communities? Why is there a story to be told? What changes does the upsurge in philosophy in communities signify?

One way to think about the meaning, value and development of philosophy in communities would be to begin with an analysis of the concepts ‘philosophy’ and ‘community’ and their relationships to each another. I’m going to leave that to others, and here I’ll take a different approach. To generate a useful account, one aimed at helping us to better understand the rise of philosophy in communities, I will explore and problematize philosophy in communities through considering philosophical communities as groups of people and philosophy as engagement in social, spatial and political as well as linguistic practices. This methodological move makes the task of describing and analysing philosophy in communities somewhat complex as it involves sociology, geography and politics as moments in philosophical practice. And this is not the only complexity. As this volume shows, philosophy in communities comprises a wide range of related practices that fit loosely, perhaps uneasily, and sometimes with resistance under the umbrella term ‘philosophy in communities’. Philosophy in communities groups have different views and expressions concerning the place of practical and political action, about their relationship to academic philosophy traditions, about their purposes, about how they should be characterized as well as about the meaning and value of philosophy itself.

The quotation from Cicero that prefixes this chapter, about Socrates’s contribution to the development of philosophy, asks us to appreciate his role in getting us to consider philosophy in relation to places, persons and purposes. I think that this sort of approach will help best in capturing the most important characteristics of philosophy in communities groups, and in generating some analytic insight into the special goods therein. In order to tell the story, I will begin from the perspective of one of the family members – Community Philosophy – a brand of philosophy in communities that is playful with places, characterful in people, ambitious in politics and pro-social and countercultural in purposes. It is a version of philosophy in communities that has some roots in the UK in the recent past, but is not restricted to these islands. I will give Community Philosophy practitioners the first words through an insider’s description taken from a recent project.

Community Philosophy: Participatory philosophical engagement in the Socratic tradition

Community Ph ilosophy is collaborative and philosophical thinking, reflection and action by members of voluntary groups who meet and think together in civil society’s informal learning spaces. It is a growing grass-roots movement that is connecting people together in new associations and with novel aims and in altered spaces. The community groups formed and developed are characterized by democratic agenda-setting and decision-making, communitarian mutual support and challenge and productive, action-oriented dialogues. It is more street philosophy than academic philosophy, and it aims to change people, places and practices. It seems to be helping to change conceptions of philosophy too (Bramall 2013).

We get a first sense here that Community Philosophers are, in general, not satisfied with making academic philosophy accessible to those who would otherwise not be able to join in. They’re not content to help with what one might term ‘the redistribution of traditional philosophical goods’. Community Philosophers tend to be, rather, people who are committed to public philosophizing with others, and about the concepts and concerns that matter to participants. Community Philosophy aims to be, as does every other philosophy in communities group, a transforming practice, with its own particular intellectual and practice roots. One way to understand the specificity of Community Philosophy is to explore the relation between its practices and those of academic philosophy. How are they related? How do they compare and contrast?

I was listening recently to some academic philosophy colleagues who were talking about the problems of generating public understanding of, and public engagement with, philosophy. One made a distinction between two aspects of philosophy. He said: on the one hand, we can see philosophy as a body of knowledge; on the other, we can understand it as set of skills. I think ‘body of knowledge’ is a bit loose, as included in the body are things like the concepts, concerns and questions located in academic philosophical traditions, as well as the thinkers, books and arguments; but it is precise enough to make the distinction count. The skills aspect, in contrast, indicates philosophical capacities or abilities, like how to analyse concepts, how to use logic, or how to construct or critique an argument. Perhaps, more broadly, we might call these philosophical capacities or abilities, the methods of philosophy.

Using this distinction, it may be tempting to think of Community Philosophy as inducting non-professional philosophers into the methods of philosophy – a sort of practical introduction to ‘philosophizing’, developing the skills but leaving out the knowledge tradition. And this might be very valuable. After all, the tools and moves of academic philosophy seem to be generally useful for those wishing to argue and reflect, with respect for logic and reason, about matters of meaning and value. But to characterize Community Philosophy this way would be to miss a very important point; indeed, it would be to miss the very nature of Community Philosophy.

Community Philosophy is not merely public philosophizing, and it is not ‘philosophy lite’. It is a particular, complex, embedded social philosophical practice. Community Philosophy has its own peculiar combination of roots, practices and aims. It has its own particular goods, processes and traditions, its own ways of evaluating and developing practice, actions and contributions. To get a feel for the uniqueness of Community Philosophy, we might usefully go again to its Socratic roots.

Community Philosophy is a mode of participatory public engagement in the Socratic tradition. The Socratic dialogues are set in non-standard learning spaces, like markets and fields and dinner parties. Socrates invited those with whom he conversed into conversations about the meaning and value of issues and concerns that mattered to them. He helped them to identify and problematize the significant concepts involved. Socrates provoked and disrupted. He encouraged people to question accepted wisdoms, meanings, authority and power relations. Socratic philosophy is a philosophy of street and marketplace rather than of the academy, and its effects are judged by actions in people’s lived worlds. Socratic philosophy is a risky political venture; it opens up enquiries and actions where the outcomes are uncertain and unclear. It can ruffle feathers, as Socrates found out all too well.

Community Philosophy draws heavily on this tradition; in particular it draws on the Socratic conception of philosophy. The philosophy of Community Philosophy is a redistributed and redistributing philosophy, powered by the energy of purposeful community engagement. It is a critical, disruptive practice, nourished by academic philosophy, but at the same time a critical friend of the academy. Community Philosophy questions and challenges some limiting conceptions of philosophy – the sort that see philosophy as a canonical study of writers by scholars or as synonymous with critical thinking. It offers an alternative, or additive conception, one that aspires to be a practice fit for the purposes of critical active engagement by any, and all, people. In common with academic philosophy traditions, it is reflective, thought-provoking and understanding-generating, but it is not adequately described as a body of knowledge or skill set. Community Philosophy is a way of being and doing with commitment and with others, as thoughtful reflective agents.

UK Community Philosophy in the wider context of philosophy in communities

Community Philosophy in the UK developed as a particular practice through the dedicated work of a handful of pioneers who had the philosophical insight and moral drive to seek to refashion and repurpose academic philosophy into a community-based practical philosophy. But these pioneers did not develop Community Philosophy in a vacuum. The pioneer UK Community Philosophers drew on the ideas and practices of critical thinkers and activists like bell hooks in the United States (hooks 2003) and Paulo Freire in Brazil (Freire 1970). They developed practices from multiple sources including youth and community work and in dialogue with academic philosophers, particularly in philosophy of education. It also developed through dialogue with existing non-standard an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Foreword: Community-engaged philosophy for lifelong learning
• Preface: ‘In all things of nature there is something wonderful’
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Part One Philosophy and Community: Theories
• Part Two Philosophy and Community: Practices
• Part Three Philosophy and Community: Possibilities
• Index
• Copyright