Filipe Felizardo is a philosophy student, artist, and musician from Lisbon with an informal education in film, comics, and musical pedagogy. They founded Antumbra Publishing House, dedicated to photography and to Portuguese translations of neo-rationalist thought. Of the latter, they have published essays by Patricia Reed and Cássia Siqueira.
Since 2011 they have developed the Constructive Listening Workshop, a pedagogical practice for the introduction of music and philosophy from ages 3 to 12.
Their current research in Critical Philosophy at the New Centre for Research & Practice focuses on systematic reconceptions of learning and alienation, as understood from the workspaces of inferentialism, Marxist activity-approach, and anti-vitalism. Their current project, “Paideia2: The Formation of the Inhuman”, aims to propose the concept of radical universalism as a meta-concept for a revised and revisable pedagogy, locating the possibility of overcoming capitalism in the formation of agency.
Felizardo is also working on a comics adaptation of Peter Wolfendale's “Essay on Transcendental Realism” and translations of essays by Wilfrid Sellars and Rob Lucas.
Website and Links: Blog: https://evenprometheusstartedsmall.wordpress.com/ , Instagram: @antumbra_philebus
Project:
The upcoming paper is to be considered a part of a larger project, titled “Paideia2 – The Formation of the Inhuman”, currently being developed for the New Centre of Research & Practice's Certificate Program in Critical Philosophy. That project's main aim is to propose a philosophy of pedagogy under the lens of a meta-concept of radical universalism, as derived from research on and the works of Ilyenkov and Vygotsky, and aided by Postone's accounts of labour, history, and value, in order to interrogate contemporary logics of pedagogy. At the end, it should be able to propose Girard's linear logic as a strong contender for the logic of learning, as well as map such an organon onto Plato's concept of mixture and its importance for realizing ever newer forms of the human.
Specifically, this paper will look at modes of social reproduction enmeshed with the meta-concept of paideia – the enforming, bildung, or formation of the human as the formation of intelligence. We will ask if the formation of the human-particular can be seen instead as a social transformation of intelligence isomorphic to an account of learning as transformation of the human-universal.
For this aim, we will consider 'formation' as a mode of production. As such, it will be critiqued as the mode of production of intelligence. This will be done by positing a labor-based mode of production in pedagogy, under the conceptual framework of Postone's 'Time, Labor & Social Domination'. Afterward, we will analyse it alongside an alternative mode – that of activity, as proposed by Evald Ilyenkov's account of human activity. Moreover, we will pin-point the money form as that which will allow us to emancipate labor-based pedagogy into activity-based pedagogy, where this abstraction's engine can be modelled as a form of the human constituted as realizer of intelligibilities, which is in turn realized and made intelligible anew by these.
With these modes of production having been made transparent to themselves, we will propose that each has its underlying logic, and map it accordingly. On account of the strong import of modal logic in social reproduction and the synthetising impact this has on the formation of intelligent agents, their self-conception as social individuals and especially the self-conception of their agency and its import on reality, these results will be considered under the framework of an enlargened modality. Here, necessity, possibility, and contingency are augmented by intelligibility and realizability, as to provide a clearer view of each pedagogical logic's methodology and its purported results.
It will be claimed that a labor-based pedagogical mode of production operates under a formalist logic framework – demonstrative, apodictic, merely syntactic, and abstract. On the other hand, the activity-based pedagogical mode of production will appear as constructive, not apodictic, not merely syntactic, and not merely abstract. With this in mind, we will propose Jean-Yes Girard's linear logic as the best candidate for activity-based pedagogical frameworks. It will be claimed that such is the case, by virtue of linear logic's fruitfulness in terms of our augmented modality and its appropriateness to a dialectical model of the form of the human. Here, dialectical is not a progressivist prescription, but a developmental, synthetic method, wherefrom one gleans mixture, negation, and clarity. As such, linear logic appears appropriate to a pedagogical framework hinging upon revisable grounds, transparency, and the formation of emancipated agents who can emancipate - transform - the framework itself.