TEACHING PHILOSOPHY AND ENACTIVISM
Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philosophia October 30, 2021 Andrei Simionescu-Panait
This paper argues that enactivism offers a viable alternative to constructivist and classical views of learning, particularly in mathematics and philosophy education. Classical approaches treat students as mechanisms that solve fixed problems and store universally correct solutions, which reduces learning to informational efficiency. Enactivism, rooted in Varela and Maturana's work and updated by Davis, Proulx, and Simmt, proposes that students collaboratively produce problems, see multiple solutions, and become performers of knowledge. The article applies these ideas to philosophical education, addressing students' difficulty connecting new texts with their intuition, and offers a lesson design that explores students' thinking before introducing a text.