New APPS

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

Today is UNESCO’s World Philosophy Day, which is celebrated on the third Thursday of November every year. As it so happens, November 20th is also the United Nations’ Universal Children’s Day (here is a blog post I wrote for the occasion 2 years ago). I am truly delighted that these two days coincide today, as children and philosophy are two of my greatest passions. But the intimate connection between children and philosophy runs much deeper than my particular, individual passions, and so it should be celebrated.* As Wittgenstein famously (but somewhat dismissively) put it: 

Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult "What is that?" (Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951)

My own favorite definition of philosophy is that philosophy is at heart the activity of asking questions about things that appear to be obvious but are not. (True enough, it also involves attempting to provide answers and giving arguments to support one’s preferred answers.) And so it is incumbent on the philosopher to ask for example ‘What is time, actually?’, while everybody else goes about their daily business taking the nature of time for granted. Indeed, philosophy is intimately connected with curiosity and inquisitiveness, and this idea famously goes back all the way to the roots of philosophy as we know it:

[W]onder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. He was not a bad genealogist who said that Iris (the messenger of heaven) is the child of Thaumas (wonder). (Plato, Theaetetus 155d)

It is through wonder that humans now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about the greater matters too, e.g. about the changes of the moon and of the sun, about the stars and about the origin of the universe. (Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 1, 982b)

And this is exactly what human youngsters do too: they have insatiable curiosity to understand the world around them, which goes much beyond mere instrumental knowledge and survival (as shown for example in the work of Michael Tomasello). My main support for this claim is the work of developmental psychologist Paul L. Harris (see here), who emphasizes the importance of dialogue between children and their caregivers for their cognitive and emotional development. These dialogues are overwhelmingly composed of questions posed by the children; when they are surrounded by responsive, patient caregivers who regularly engage with their questions, then their development takes place in an optimal way. 

And thus, it makes perfect sense for the World Philosophy Day to coincide with Universal Children’s Day. Today is a day to celebrate wonder and curiosity, and to remind ourselves of how important it is to nurture and cultivate our children’s curiosity as well as our own, as philosophers.

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* See also the SEP entry on philosophy for children.