<b>CHAPTER 9:</b> an Exploration of Student Philosophical Literacy in the South African Context

The discipline of philosophy necessitates that budding philosophers learn and enact certain practices. However, while more established philosophers intuitively understand what philosophy is (and, more importantly, how it is practised), it is not always clear that such knowledge is communicated to the students in their classrooms. In this sense, engagement with philosophical disciplinarity often does not explicitly occur pedagogically, and as a result, students might be left to puzzle out the contours of the philosophical endeavour on their own. Concurrently there exists a lacuna, both in terms of philosophical reflection on philosophical disciplinarity and in terms of how such disciplinarity is taught (especially within the South African context). Such reflection is largely absent in both the philosophical and educational literature. This chapter aims to address the gap by means of the reflections of two philosophers from different philosophical traditions on their praxis and possible shortcomings in the philosophical classroom. This chapter takes an autoethnographic methodological approach as a means to share lived experiences in this regard. By engaging explicitly with philosophical disciplinarity from two (often divergent) traditions, this chapter aims to encourage philosophers to think critically about how their disciplinary praxis can and should be communicated explicitly to their students. From their autoethnographic reflections, it becomes apparent that the authors of the current study at times fall short of explicitly engaging with philosophical disciplinarity in their own classrooms, but also that certain corrective avenues are available. By beginning a conversation, this work hopes to ignite a discussion regarding philosophical disciplinarity in South Africa through providing an initial conceptualisation of what this concept may entail.