Do You Recall Asking Philosophical Questions as a Child?

In his 1997 memoir Confessions of a Philosopher, late thinker Bryan Magee recalls how he began wondering about philosophical problems from a young age. The world presented strange puzzles that dazzled his childhood curiosity.

You may recall thinking about such puzzles yourself.

For instance: if there was a day before yesterday, and a day before that, and a day before that, does that mean you can keep going back forever? Is there an endless number of days? Or was there a ‘first’ day and will there be a ‘last’?

As well as finding time troublesome, the 9-year-old Magee also encountered problems when thinking about space.

Could you just keep traveling on and on in one direction? Or would you eventually come to an ‘end’?

Dwelling on the beginning (and end) of time and space, Magee spotted a problem: if there was a beginning to space and time, then by definition that meant there was nothing before the beginning.

But, if there was nothing before the beginning, then how could anything begin in the first place? How could something possibly come from nothing?

The young Magee found himself consumed by the problem, and thought he must be missing something. “There were adults who I thought at first might be able to help me,” Magee writes,

but their responses left me more bewildered than before. Either they admitted they could not solve it, and then went on to talk about other things, as if this particular question were not interesting enough even to discuss, or else they actively pooh-poohed it with superior little laughs and remarks like: ‘Oh, you don’t want to go wasting your time worrying about things like that...’

Magee was unimpressed. “If they were unable as I was to answer the question,” he remarks,

how could they feel superior to it? Why weren’t they disconcerted, and why didn’t they find it even interesting? After several perplexing rebuffs I stopped talking to people about it and just got on with thinking about it by myself.

Why children make great philosophers

In my interview with contemporary philosopher Scott Hershovitz on this topic, he argues children make surprisingly brilliant philosophers for two main reasons:

Firstly, they don’t know a lot about the world: they’re just really puzzled by it. And part of not knowing about the world is not knowing what other people take for granted, or what the standard explanations of things are. They’re constantly seeing things and wondering, for example, why someone gets to tell them what to do, or how big the universe is — whatever it is that pops into their head, they’re curious about it and thinking it through.

And then I think the second thing is they’re just fearless as thinkers, for a variety of reasons. They’re not afraid about being wrong — they’re wrong all the time — and it’s not embarrassing to them that they’re wrong.

Hershovitz offers some fantastic examples of questions children ask that cut right to the heart of philosophical issues.

A boy named Ian, for instance, unable to watch his favorite TV channel because three people wanted to watch something else, asks:

Why is it better for three people to be selfish than one?

“That is maybe my favorite question in the book, actually,” Hershovitz comments:

The point is that the child who asked that question, Ian, hasn’t yet been acculturated in the way we make decisions, so this is the first time he’s encountered the idea that if more people want something, that makes it the right or fair thing to do. His question is a challenge to certain economic ways of thinking about the world, i.e. that we should just be trying to maximize the satisfaction of people’s preferences. It’s also a challenge to democracy in a really interesting way: if people are voting for their selfish interests, why is that a good way of making decisions?

Ian’s is a fantastic question and is typical of the kind that children ask seemingly effortlessly in ways that undermine our social practices.

Once you have an eye out for these kinds of inquiries, you’ll start noticing kids saying all sorts of philosophically interesting things just with their casual comments and queries.

​Are there any questions you remember asking as a child that went unanswered?

• Do you relate to the frustrations of Ian and the 9-year-old Magee?
• If so, why do you think people aren’t more disconcerted about such philosophical problems, as Magee laments?
• And if you’re not disconcerted by such questions as why anything exists, what’s your secret?

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