editors' welcome

Abstract

Childhood and philosophy is a journal which has been waiting to be born at least since Socrates sat down in the unique (at least for us) shelter of the 5th century bc polis and founded a discipline. The journal’s conception lies much, much later, in the fateful historical meeting between childhood education and philosophy. This meeting, in turn, had to wait for Rousseau’s mantic pronouncements of the Emile, sent like a letter in a bottle to the approaching revolution, and for the slow development, over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, of a kind of adult actually capable of listening to children, much less of hearing them. This, in turn, required the romantic deconstruction of that very enlightened (male) adult whom, we must admit, made revolution possible.