Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1990
Journal / Book Title
Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children
Abstract
Like the fool for the king, the modern child of the Romantics represents for the adult original human nature in all its ambiguity and ambivalence. The child's nature, like the fool's, is both fallen and innocent, amoral and beyond morality and what is even more confusing, alternately one or the other. The child's unsocialized presence reveals and exposes the imperfections of the socialized world of adult artifice and hypocrisy. The child's very simplicity seems perverse by reason of the corruption of the adults who so judge him or her. The child is a question put to the adult world, a pretext for a radical re-evaluation of the question of what it means to be human.
Book Publisher
Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children
Journal ISSN / Book ISBN
0190-3330
MSU Digital Commons Citation
Kennedy, David K., "(1990) Fools, Young Children, and Philosophy" (1990). Collected Papers of David Kennedy. 9.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/dkennedy/9
Published Citation
Kennedy, David (1990) Fools, Young Children, and Philosophy. Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children 8(4): 2-6.