Thoughts about CoPI, university Philosophy teaching & philosophising (1)

Recently I have been thinking about Philosophy and CoPI.  In chapter one of  “Transforming Thinking”      I wrote

“When I went to university I made a tremendous discovery: that there was a name for the kind of thinking I had been doing all my life – it was called Philosophy, and moreover it had a 2,000 year history.

I had always been fascinated with questions about: the nature of reality; how we know what is true and what is ‘correct’; what made some actions and decisions fair or just; the nature of good and bad; why some things are beautiful. As a young child I would ask my teachers, but I never seemed to get replies that answered the questions I was actually asking; it seemed as though these were the wrong questions. The teachers at the local village Primary school were (mostly) kind and caring. They thought I was a ‘dreamer’, and they probably thought these were fantastical childish questions, which were distracting me from class work.  Gradually they ‘weaned me off’ asking – but I never stopped wondering.

Then when I was ten years old we had the good fortune to have a wonderful science teacher. When I asked Mr. Howie whether ‘power’ was real in the same way as objects were real, he did not treat it as a ‘silly’ question. We were learning about electrical circuits and another teacher might just have been annoyed at the distraction, but he responded by giving me books on theoretical physics. For the first time I encountered serious thinking about the nature of reality and of the world, and the possibility that there was more than one answer, and further that the answer had to be argued for and demonstrated. It seemed to me that there could be nothing more important!  Although theoretical physics did not address questions of morality or aesthetics, it did raise questions of metaphysics and also of epistemology, (of course at the time I did not know the names for these kinds of questions, or even that they had names). Later, in a new school and studying algebra, I was trying to fathom what ‘tending to infinity’ meant. There was no Mr. Howie to ask. An exasperated teacher told me that it didn’t mean anything; it was just how you describe this graph, and this part of the equation. If anything that answer made the concept even more puzzling!

 

In encountering the discipline of Philosophy at University, I found the home for all these questions.  It was a revelation and a kind of liberation! It felt as though a great secret had been kept from us all through our childhood and teenage years. It wasn’t because here were the answers to all the questions, but rather that this kind of thinking was important and fundamental.  All my classmates seemed to feel the same way: we were all excited about the topics and we spent hours discussing philosophical puzzles in the coffee bar. But after a year or so we began to feel something was missing. We were learning the canon of Philosophy, and every week we wrote essays putting arguments for and against the theories of great philosophers but not about our own thoughts. “

Now my son has begun Honours Philosophy at university, and he is so disappointed! He is not able to philosophise. At first he just found his tutorials a bit frustrating as there was no structure and the discussions rambled and did not build or lead anywhere. everyone simply put forward their opinion about the philosophical topic, one after another. But he was raised with CoPI, and could see all the missed opportunities where the talk cold have been shaped into a real dialogue. Later he is even more discouraged as the lecturers and tutors have no interest in original thinking about the topics – they only want to see a re-iteration of the history of philosophy they are teaching and not philosophising on the part of the students themselves.

But for him it is so much worse because he has been doing CoPI since he was 5, and so is used to engaging in philosophical reasoning about his own and his classmates’ ideas about philosophical concepts. He expected to continue this at university, but that is not what university Philosophy does!

I invented CoPI precisely to create the opportunity for us and then later for others to do what we were not doing in Honours Philosophy – and that is to do original thinking and to philosophise ourselves!

I thought there was  a huge difference in what I observed professional philosophers doing themselves and what they were teaching us. And over time I created CoPI to capture what I thought the professional philosophers were doing , but in a non academic form. That is I tried to capture the essence of reasoned philosophising and create a format that would allow everyone to do this kind of thinking.

“Then one week we were given the option of writing a modern philosophical dialogue instead of the usual essay. We all chose this option thinking it would be easier – just like a record of our coffee bar discussions. But we were wrong. Writing a philosophical dialogue was much more difficult. We learned that a dialogue is not a discussion. As in a play script the dialogue had to develop, it had to have tension, and it had to have variety and there had to be character development shown through the dialogue itself. But a philosophical dialogue had to do more; it had to show a development in philosophical ideas as well.  Sitting in the library trying to write such a dialogue was not productive, so I decided to try to a theatrical technique to get my classmates to improvise a philosophical dialogue.[1] This was the beginning of what would develop over time into the Community of Philosophical Inquiry method.

The most challenging aspect of improvising or writing a philosophical dialogue was: how to create the development of the philosophical ideas within the dialogue. We had no guidance as to how to do this; in fact we had no guidance in how to write a philosophical dialogue beyond the advice to look at Plato.  However there was one philosopher who wrote about the development of Thought – Hegel. So for the purposes of the improvisation exercise I asked my class mates to use a (simplified) Hegelian structure: the first speaker should put forward a thesis; the second speaker should put forward an antithesis; the third speaker should then offer a synthesis of the thesis and antithesis; the fourth speaker should regard the synthesis as a new thesis; the fifth speaker should then offer a new antithesis and so on.

It was extremely difficult to accomplish, but it was fun to try and we did manage to achieve a kind of development of ideas. There was a problem with the final result of our written dialogues: they all looked similar, and partly because of this we received very low marks. Of course the essays were bound to be similar because they were the product of a collaborative exercise. Setting aside the fact that they were all similar, the written dialogues were not very good and the task was never set again. However, I was fascinated by the fact that the written dialogues did not reflect the energy that had been generated in the improvisation, and did not reflect either the work everyone did or the delight that was produced when someone managed to find a new antithesis or synthesis. I decided it was worth pursuing: this way of working was so much more interesting than listening to lectures, or having discussions or writing essays. And the opportunity to continue practising this improvising dialogue arose a few months later.”

However I am now wondering whether what I created (the CoPI Method) IS really a non-academic distillation of what professional philosophers do?

Or is it really something else?

There was another influence on my creation of CoPI that was also important ..  that i will talk about in the next blog

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[1] Having spent as much time working as a Stage Manager in the university theatre as studying philosophy, I had watched writer-directors use improvisation exercises to generate scripts.

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