The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life

Can't wait until this book arrives in my mailbox. My own review will come later. In the meantime here is what Anthony Gottlieb wrote in the NYTimes: It's always gratifying to hear a new twist on an old joke. In the Marx Brothers' "Duck Soup," Rufus T. Firefly, played by Groucho, is handed the Freedonia cabinet's treasury report: "Why, a child of 4 could understand this report. Run out and find me a 4-year-old child -- I can't make head or tail of it." Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has run out and found plenty of 4-year-old children. In her new book, she announces that they are in some ways "smarter, more imaginative, more caring and even more conscious than adults are." Gopnik does not go so far as to propose that we fire Timothy Geithner and march in a phalanx of preschoolers to fix the credit crunch. She does, however, make the bold suggestion that thinking about small children can shed new light on ancient philosophical problems. More...