Some important news to begin 2011 with: Matthew Lipman, creator of the Philosophy for Children (P4C) movement and Professor Emeritus of Montclair State University, died on 26th Dec 2010. He was 87. I paid tribute in my book for the profound effect his writing had on my thinking, but I would also like to dedicate this blog entry to him too.

Prof Lipman was born in New Jersey in 1923. He served in the U.S. Infantry from 1943‑1946 in France and Germany, and was awarded two bronze stars during the conflict. His experiences helping to liberate concentration camps in Germany is recounted in his autobiography, A Life Teaching Thinking.

After the war, he studied at Stanford, Columbia, the Sorbonne in Paris and the University of Austria, earning his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Columbia in 1954. His dissertation, later published as What Happens in Art (1967) drew on the work of John Dewey, with whom Lipman conversed, and who complimented the dissertation.

Lipman’s experiences teaching philosophy to college students and adult education students, and witnessing the political upheaval that took place on university campuses around the USA in the 1960s, convinced him that learning to think critically, to inquire about philosophical questions and to form reasonable judgments should begin much earlier.

In 1969, he began writing his first philosophical novel for children, Harry Stottlemeier's Discovery, which was piloted in public schools in Montclair, New Jersey. In 1972 Lipman left Columbia for Montclair State College to further develop his ideas of what came to be known as “Philosophy for Children.” In 1974 he established the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC) with co-founder Ann Margaret Sharp, and for the next three decades, Lipman became a world leader in the fields of critical thinking, pre-college philosophy and educational reform. Today P4C is practised in more than 60 countries and Lipman's work has been translated into dozens of languages.

Lipman’s academic career involved teaching courses in philosophy and education, writing the world’s first systematic pre-college philosophy curriculum, creating masters and doctoral programs in Philosophy for Children, conducting empirical research on children’s thinking and philosophical inquiry, founding the journal Thinking, conducting conferences and professional development workshops, acquiring research grants, and writing scores of books and journal articles. He retired from Montclair State in 2001 but remained an active scholar, publishing numerous articles and interviews, and writing his autobiography, which was published in 2008