The Philosopher's Child: Critical Essays in the Western Tradition (review)

Susan M. Turner and Gareth B. Matthews, eds. The Philosopher's Child: Critical Essays in the Western Tradition. Rochester, N.Y.: U of Rochester P, 1998.

Most of the great philosophers had no children: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and Mill were all childless, and Rousseau, of course, is famous for abandoning his own children at the door of a foundling asylum. Children have also received relatively scant attention in the history of philosophy. The aim of this collection is to remedy this deficiency. The eleven essays here cover Socrates, Aristotle, the Stoics, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Shulamith Firestone, and John Rawls. Only Firestone (a radical feminist philosopher) is not part of the philosophical "canon"; she is included presumably because she is one of the few philosophers who have given extensive attention to children and offered arguments in favor of children's liberation not found elsewhere. The essays are all titled in the same way: "Socrates' Children," "John Locke's Children," "Immanuel Kant's Children"--a poignant touch, in looking at the ruminations on children and childhood offered by these (for the most part) childless bachelors.

As would be expected in a collection of this sort, the essays are uneven in aim and quality. Some actually provide what is promised (an overview of the philosopher's distilled view of the child); others opt to treat a more narrow question, examining one particular aspect of the philosopher's treatment of children. Some of the essays are chiefly of interest within philosophy, such as those exploring the implications of a philosopher's view of children for the rest of his theory; others, however, raise interesting questions in their own right about the nature of childhood and the rights and liberties to which children should be entitled. One central message that emerges from the disparate essays collected here is that philosophers ignore children at their peril.

At one extreme, some philosophers have treated children as paradigmatic of what it means to be human. The Epicureans, for example (not represented by a chapter in this volume but discussed in Lawrence C. Becker's extremely helpful essay on the Stoics), believed that by examining infants in the cradle, we could see human nature (as opposed to subsequent nurture) most clearly revealed, that we could see what we are prior to what we become. According to the Epicureans, young children are motivated chiefly by the desire to seek pleasure and to avoid pain; they concluded that this fact gives reason "for thinking that pleasure was, by our very nature, the ultimate or final human good" (49). Fast-forwarding a couple of millennia, Philip Shields presents Wittgenstein as basing his philosophy of language on the view that to understand what language means, we need to understand how language is learned. And for Wittgen-stein, who actually taught elementary school in Austria for six years, "the child is the paradigm of the learner" (175).

Other philosophers have examined the ways in which children are importantly different from adults. The Stoics, according to Becker, held that children's motivations are in fact quite distinct from those of adults, who have been led through an appropriate process of moral development. Children are motivated primarily by attachment to and affection for themselves; as they grow, they learn to attach themselves to external objects and persons, and finally to virtue itself. Likewise, as Daryl McGowan Tress explains, Aristotle held that children are "unfinished" beings relative to a human telos, and are led to the actualization of their potential through the nurture and discipline of their parents. For Locke, presented in the essay by David Archard, children are, "Travellers newly arrived in a strange country, of which they know nothing" (87), a "white Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas" on which experience has yet to write (87).

Yet it is important not to overstate these differences, either. Certain...