philosophy as children
practicing thought beyond the logic of maturity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12957/childphilo.2026.95048Keywords:
philosophy of education, childhood, epistemology, phenomenology, decolonizationAbstract
This article proposes “philosophizing as children” as an epistemic stance that challenges the adultist assumptions embedded in the philosophical tradition. Rather than viewing childhood as a stage preceding rational thought, it argues that traits associated with childhood—curiosity, openness, and dependence—are fundamental conditions for the act of philosophizing itself. Drawing selectively on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and Ahmed’s phenomenology of attention, the paper describes a mode of thinking that remains in relation to the unknown and resists gestures of mastery and closure that characterize adult rationality. In dialogue with Tronto’s ethics of care and Lugones’s notion of world-traveling, it suggests that thinking as children entails a relational and affective commitment to others. Philosophizing as children entails an intentional infantilization of philosophical thought, understood as a refusal of adultist norms of mastery, closure, and epistemic self-sufficiency in favor of wonder, relational responsibility, and openness to alterity.
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