Intensive Resonances

Expands the concept of Mathew Lipman’s Community of Philosophical Inquiry through a reading of Deleuze.

In this book, Arthur Wolf uses the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to develop a more inclusive pedagogy, especially focusing on the implications of affective thinking. The exclusion of the affective in what it means to think directly impacts the lives of children by limiting their existential sensibilities and capacity to sense the world as immanently given. The conceptualization of affective thinking and its relation to pedagogy has not been sufficiently developed, leading to the question of how to relate the affective to thinking and how to develop its consequences for pedagogy.

Two ideas that are paramount to Deleuze’s project in theorizing what it means to think are “affect”—used to describe an impingement on, or modulation of, a body’s intensity of existing—and “immanence”—used as an ontological commitment that this intensity of existing is univocal, expressive, and relational. By analyzing Deleuze’s theory, Wolf shows the ways in which Matthew Lipman’s Philosophy for Children approach and its pedagogical cornerstone, the Community of Philosophical Inquiry, can be expanded and brings his ideas into the pedagogical realm.