Abstract

Philosophy and the young child: the very combination of these words in the title of a book may occasion the reader's surprise, especially when he finds that the book concerns predominantly 4-6 year-olds. But children's philosophizing, the subject of the present essay, is deemed by some authors to be a common and quite natural phenomenon. At the same time, it is extremely difficult to extract this common phenomenon from the shell of the commonplace in which it is enveloped, and to perceive in the flux of a child's perception and awareness of the world that aspect of it which is philosophical thinking. G. B. Matthews' book Philosophy and the Young Child is in our opinion an interesting attempt to deal with this far from simple problem