Philosophy of the Many: High School Philosophy and a Politics of Difference

Abstract

As we start a new millennium, the conviction that exclusionary practices need to be fought at all levels of society is becoming gradually more accepted. Nevertheless, as I show in this thesis, many if not most researchers on High School Philosophy (HSP) operate from what Iris Marion Young (1990) calls a logic of identity, which continues to be exclusionary even when it attempts to reach “all.” My objective in this thesis, therefore, is to map out the HSP literature in terms of Young’s “Politics of Difference,” and, by doing that, to suggest ways in which it could be more inclusive. This adaptation of Young’s Politics of Difference to HSP is presented in this thesis in six chapters. In chapter 1, I summarize the main aspects of Young’s argument. In chapter 2, I give an overview of the current literature on HSP, showing that it is scarce and scattered. This thesis’s first contribution, therefore, is as a representative, though not exhaustive, catalogue of the HSP literature. In chapter 3, I present a deeper analysis of the HSP literature, dividing it into two main strands, “the selective” and the “universal” approaches to HSP. I also argue in this chapter that both these approaches are problematic, because they exclude many, privileges some over others and alienate all. In chapter 4, I present a brief analysis of the epistemology informing both the selective and the universal approaches to HSP. In this chapter, I focus on the so-called “Myth of Neutrality,” which is another manifestation of the logic of identity. Using as illustration the works of two authors, Robert Simon and Harvey Siegel, I show in this chapter how the myth of neutrality manifests the positivism and reductionism typical of the logic of identity. Finally, in chapter 5 I present my positive proposal for HSP, which I called “Philosophy of Many” (PoM), as a more inclusive alternative to both the selective and the universal approaches to HSP. The final chapter reviews the main conclusions of this study and suggests direction for further research.