By examining the parent-child relationship, Childlike Peace in Merleau-Ponty and Levinas argues that the primordial structure of our personal encounters with others should be understood as a dialectical spiral. Drawing on the work of twentieth-century philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas, and informed by recent advances in cognitive neuroscience and child development, Brock Bahler develops a phenomenological description of the parent-child relationship in order to articulate an account of intersubjectivity that is fundamentally ethically oriented, dialogical, and mutually dynamic. This dialectical spiral—in contrast to Cartesian tradition of the subject and the Hegelian master-slave dialectic—suggests that our lives are equiprimordially interwoven with both the richness of mutual engagement and the responsibility to be for-the-other. The parent-child relationship provides the basis for a theoretical account of intersubjectivity that is marked by a creative interaction between self and other that cannot be reduced to an economic exchange, a totalizing structure, or a unilateral asymmetrical responsibility. In conversation with the philosophical thought of Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Hegel, Sartre, and Freud, as well as recent research in cognitive neuroscience and child development, this work will be of interest for those working in the fields of continental philosophy, embodied cognition, philosophy of childhood, psychoanalysis, psychology, philosophy for children (P4C), and education.

Befriending the North Wind is about the moral lives of children and their agency in decisions about death. It examines the dimensions of human meaning children reveal and the new horizons they open to us. It asserts that children can die a good death and that they can and should have a voice in their end-of-life care.

Philosophical Children in Literary Situations: Toward a Phenomenology of Education argues that both phenomenology and children’s literature can assist one another in understanding the lived experience of children. Through careful readings of central figures in the phenomenological tradition, including Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, Costello introduces both the novice and the scholar to the phenomenological method of describing community, emotion, religion, gender, and loss—experiences that are central to all humans, but especially to the developing child. When turning to literary analysis, Costello uses the phenomenological theory discussed to open up the literary texts of familiar and award-winning children’s chapter books toward new layers of interpretation, reading such novels as To Kill a Mockingbird, A Wrinkle in Time, and Charlotte’s Web to participate in ongoing conversations about childhood perception within children’s literature studies and philosophy for children. Scholars of philosophy, education, literary studies, and psychology will find this book particularly useful.

Thinking, Childhood, and Time: Contemporary Perspectives on the Politics of Education is an interdisciplinary exploration of the notion of childhood and its place in a philosophical education. Contributors consider children’s experiences of time, space, embodiment, and thinking. By acknowledging Hannah Arendt’s notion that every child brings a new beginning into the world, they address the question of how educators can be more responsive to the Otherness that childhood offers, while assuming that most educational models follow either a chronological model of child development or view children as human beings that are lacking. The contributors explore childhood as a philosophical concept in children, adults, and even beyond human beings—Childhood as a (forgotten) dimension of the world. Contributors also argue that a pedagogy that does not aim for an “exodus of childhood,” but rather responds to the arrival of a new human being responsibly (dialogically), fosters a deeper appreciation of the newness that children bring in order to sensitize us for our own Childhood as adults as well and allow us to welcome other forms of childhood in the world. As a whole, this book argues that the experience of natality, such as the beginning of life, is not chronologically determined, but rather can occur more than once in a human life and beyond. Scholars of philosophy, education, psychology, and childhood studies will find this book particularly useful.

Although philosophy of childhood has always played some part in philosophical discourse, its emergence as a field of postmodern theory follows the rise, in the late nineteenth century, of psychoanalysis, for which childhood is a key signifier. Then in the mid-twentiethcentury Philipe Aries’s seminal Centuries of Childhood introduced the master-concept of childhood as a social and cultural invention, thereby weakening the strong grip of biological metaphors on imagining childhood. Today, while philosophy of childhood per se is a relatively boundaryless field of inquiry, it is one that has clear distinctions from history, anthropology, sociology, and even psychology of childhood. This volume of essays, which represents the work of a diverse, international set of scholars, explores the shapes and boundaries of the emergent field, and the possibilities for mediating encounters between its multiple sectors, including history of philosophy, philosophy of education, pedagogy, literature and film, psychoanalysis, family studies, developmental theory, ethics, history of subjectivity, history of culture, and evolutionary theory. The resultis an engaging introduction to philosophy of childhood for those unfamiliar with this area of scholarship, and a timely compendium and resource for those for whom it is a new disciplinary articulation.

The title of this collection, The Logic of Racial Practice, pays homage to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who coined the term habitus to name the pretheoretical, embodied dispositions that orient our social interactions and meaningfully frame our lived experience. The language of habit uniquely accounts for not only how we are unreflectively conditioned by our social environments but also how we responsibly choose to enact our habits and can change them. Hence, this collection of essays edited by Brock Bahler explores how white supremacy produces a racialized modality by which we live as embodied beings, arguing that race—and racism—is performative, habituated, and enacted. We do not regularly have to “think” about race, since race is a praxis, producing embodied habits that have become sedimented into our ways of being-in-the-world, and that instill within us racialized (and racist) dispositions, postures, and bodily comportments that inform how we interact with others. The construction of race produces a particular bodily formation in which we are shaped to viscerally perceive through a racialized lens images, words, activities, and events without any self-reflective conceptualization, and which we perpetuate throughout our day-to-day choices. The contributors argue that eradicating racism in our society requires unlearning these racialized habitus and cultivating new anti-racist habits.

This book advances an integrative approach to understanding the phenomenon of psychosocial maturation. Through a rigorous, dialectically-informed interpretation of psychoanalytic and humanistic-existential-phenomenological sources, Mufid James Hannush distils thirty essential markers of maturity. The dialectical approach is described as a process whereby lived, affect-and-value laden polar meanings are transformed, through deep insight, into complementary and integrative meta-meanings. The author demonstrates how responding to the call of maturation can be viewed as a life project that serves the ultimate purpose of living a balanced life. The book will appeal to students and scholars of human development, psychotherapy, social work, philosophy, and existential, humanistic, and phenomenological psychology.

This book develops an account of the parent-child relationship in order to articulate the essential structure of intersubjectivity as fundamentally ethically-oriented, dialogical, and mutually dynamic. Drawing on the philosophical projects of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas, as well as recent research in cognitive neuroscience and child development research, this work will be of interest to those working in the fields of continental philosophy, embodied cognition, philosophy of childhood, psychoanalysis, psychology, philosophy for children (P4C), and education.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is one of the few major phenomenologists to engage extensively with empirical research in the sciences, and the only one to examine child psychology with rigor and in such depth. His writings have recently become increasingly influential, as the findings of psychology and cognitive science inform and are informed by phenomenological inquiry. Merleau-Ponty’s Sorbonne lectures of 1949 to 1952 are a broad investigation into child psychology, psychoanalysis, pedagogy, phenomenology, sociology, and anthropology. They argue that the subject of child psychology is critical for any philosophical attempt to understand individual and intersubjective existence. Talia Welsh’s new translation provides Merleau-Ponty’s complete lectures on the seminal engagement of phenomenology and psychology.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) is well known for his work in phenomenology, but his lectures in child psychology and pedagogy have received little attention, probably because Talia Welsh translated the lectures in their entirety only in 2010. The Child as Natural Phenomenologist summarizes Merleau-Ponty’s work in child psychology, shows its relationship to his philosophical work, and argues for its continued relevance in contemporary theory and practice. ​ Welsh demonstrates Merleau-Ponty’s unique conception of the child’s development as inherently organized, meaningful, and engaged with the world, contrary to views that see the child as largely internally preoccupied and driven by instinctual demands. Welsh finds that Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about human psychology remain relevant in today’s growing field of child studies and that they provide important insights for philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists to better understand the human condition.