Reason's Children: Childhood in Early Modern Philosophy (review)

Contemporary debates on the rationality of children are of interest in many academic disciplines and potentially affect children in a wide variety of areas, such as education, human rights, law, politics, and economics. With Reason's Children, Anthony Krupp adds a valuable historical perspective to our current understanding of children as rational agents.

In his introduction to Reason's Children, Krupp promises to tell different histories of children and childhood in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He does so eloquently, interweaving the thoughts of five early modern philosophers and their contemporaries to create a multidimensional bricolage of philosophical, psychological, and theological discourse about children and rationality during the Age of Reason. This was a time when children were generally not viewed as beings that were capable of reasoning, and it would seem, at first glance, that thinkers in the Age of Reason did not have much to say about children and rationality. The few notable exceptions include John Locke's Some Thoughts on Education and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile. However, as Krupp points out, often the topics of children and childhood were simply used as vehicles to consider more fundamental questions in philosophy, such as empirical or rational views on the development of logic and reason.

Nonetheless, Krupp finds much to add to the well-known writings of Locke and Rousseau. To present this material, he puts Locke, Renè Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Christian Wolff, and Alexander Baumgarten in conversation and uses this dialogue as a thread throughout his examination of each philosopher's writings. Krupp admits that initially he hypothesized that children and childhood would be omitted from rationalist philosophy whereas empiricists would have much more to say. However, he discovered a more differentiated picture in his examination of rationalist and empiricist texts. For example, on reexamining the empiricist Locke, he finds that Locke's views "have been distorted by omission" (p. 13).

Krupp starts by building the foundation for his dialogue between philosophers on the work of Descartes. Childhood, as described in Descartes' Meditations (1641), is merely a stage in which prejudices and false opinions are acquired. The faculty of reason only appears later in life after the individual, having "killed the child," replaces it with the new adult self. Complicating this initial view, however, Krupp finds evidence in Descartes' later writing of a "coherent view of infancy and childhood as precisely a physical impediment to the unphysical activity of thought" (p. 33). That is, infants do not lack cognition or rationality. Rather, they are rational but have a faulty memory in childhood, and that is to blame for their apparent lack of reason and false judgments—a predicament that can only be resolved in mature adulthood, when "Cartesian method does not kill the child; it purges childish ways" (p. 48).

Similarly, Krupp finds more nuance in Locke's work by examining his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) in its entirety. In two chapters following his discussion of Descartes, Krupp puts Locke in conversation with Leibniz and analyzes Locke's theory of language to present him as more of a rationalist than a child-centered empiricist. Locke, contrary to common portrayals of his thought, wrote extensively about children's lack of rationality. In his Essay, Locke views children as not-yet-persons and argues, in line with Descartes and Pierre Gassendi, that "the cognition of young children is 'very useless'"(p. 69). Krupp contrasts these thoughts with those of Leibniz, who declares infant cognition to be the act of a human mind.

Leibniz, too, receives closer examination. In chapter four, Krupp investigates the tension between faith and reason, theology and philosophy. Leibniz, as opposed to Blaise Pascal and other seventeenth-century theologians, believed that faith and reason were compatible and rejected the damnation of the innocent, foremost infants. Leibniz's views clashed with those of Pierre Bayle, a fideist promoting the separation of faith and reason. In this chapter, Krupp emphasizes the theological debate on original sin, the damnation of...