Making sense of caring thinking | Professor Megan Laverty
Join us for the first instalment of our Summer Soirée series as Professor Megan Laverty explores ‘Making Sense of Caring Thinking’ – a deep dive into how philosophical inquiry fosters critical, creative, and caring thought.
Enjoy light refreshments from 5.30pm, followed by the talk from 6.00–7.00pm.
Megan J. Laverty is Professor of Philosophy and Education and Director of the Philosophy and Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Her teaching focuses on ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of education. She co-edits the Philosophy for Children Founders Series (Routledge) with Maughn Rollins Gregory and the Philosophies of Education in Art, Cinema, and Literature Series with René Vincente Arcilla (Bloomsbury).
Laverty’s scholarship examines the intersections of moral philosophy, literature, and education. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters, and is the author of Iris Murdoch’s Ethics: A Consideration of Her Romantic Vision (Bloomsbury, 2007).
Making Sense of Caring Thinking
In the early 1970s, Matthew Lipman (1923-2010) and Ann Margaret Sharp (1942-2010) began collaborating on an educational program designed to enable children to recognize and explore the philosophical dimensions of their experience and to practice critical, creative, and caring thinking within a community of peers.
Lipman and Sharp developed their conceptions of critical and creative thinking early on, introducing caring thinking only in the mid-1990s. While their views of critical and creative thinking align, their approaches to caring thinking diverge, with Sharp’s proving the more influential. Whereas Lipman conceptualized caring thinking in terms of its cognitive operations, Sharp grounded it in our ontological condition as relational beings. Sharp’s influence led scholars to emphasize the communal nature of inquiry, particularly the cultivation of caring relationships among participants. Over time, this pedagogical emphasis contributed to the eclipse of Lipman’s account.
I retrieve his theorization of caring thinking by tracing its origins within the tripartite framework and drawing on Stanley Cavell, who—though he does not use the term—also conceives of human thought as valuational, a concept he develops through reflections on language, conceptual understanding, and criteria. I conclude that Cavell’s philosophy elucidates why the community of philosophical inquiry constitutes an educational acknowledgement that thinking is inherently valuational, or caring.
