Philosophy and childhood studies

Is there, and should there be, within the multidisciplinary field of childhood studies, a place also for an autonomous philosophical subdiscipline: philosophy of childhood? What would motivate such inquiry, what might be its central concerns? Also, what would be its role among and in relation to the already existing range of specialist childhood sciences, such as the sociology, geography, and psychology of childhood?

Recently, a handbook on the philosophy of childhood was published in Germany (Drerup and Schweiger 2019). In their introduction to the handbook, the editors state that such an endeavour is concerned about philosophical questions and problems that are related to the thematic field of children and childhood, and include questions about children’s moral, political and juridical status, their instrumental and intrinsic worth, the differences between children and adults, and childhood’s constructed character. Such questions are of interest not only within systematical philosophic inquiry; also professionals in various fields, such as in education and jurisdiction, deal with such questions within their everyday ethical, political and pedagogical self-understanding and reflection, and they are also topics in politics and in public debate. All of this should support efforts to establish a philosophical subdiscipline with a systematic focus on issues of children and childhood. As the editors further note, such a field of scientific inquiry has begun to establish itself, both internationally and in the German-language academia, of which their compilation is an example.

What is a philosophy of childhood made of? First, what is meant by the word ‘philosophy’? The word certainly is used in many contexts that have little or no connection with philosophy as an academic discipline, as is explained in the current Oxford English Dictionary (OED Online). As a science and an academic discipline philosophy, according to the dictionary, is ‘the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, and the basis and limits of human understanding’; this is also the usual, contemporary sense of the word. There is however also plenty of ‘extended use’ of the same word, as when the word refers to a set of opinions or ideas held by an individual or group, a theory or attitude which acts as a guiding principle for behaviour, or an outlook or worldview. A teacher or a parent, for example, might have his or her own ‘philosophy’ of teaching, of the child, or of childhood.

Secondly, how are philosophical research and the research within ‘specialist’ childhood disciplines related? What is their interaction and how do the sciences cooperate? As for current academic philosophical research, it seems often to be done separately from empirical research. This separation is a very long development trend through the history of (Western) philosophy from its start as ‘one’ science (Hansson 2018). Some of the philosophy of the time was devoted to natural phenomena and was discernable as ‘natural philosophy’. The separation within the one science started from within this natural philosophy section, as new generations of philosophers chose to study nature by means of experiments and observations. The split also had terminological consequences: although for some time ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’ continued to be used as synonyms, ‘science’ increasingly came to denote empirical studies of nature, while ‘philosophy’ was reserved to studies in metaphysics and other non-empirical areas (ibid). ¹

Perhaps surprisingly, philosophy of childhood as an academic field was born already in Ancient Greece – the birthplace of also Western philosophy and science. The philosophy of childhood is known to have started at least with Heraclitus and his reflections about children and childhood. However, as Kohan (2019) explains, the nature, scope, and interlocutors of a philosophy of childhood provide several different understandings, depending on how two questions are answered, either explicitly or implicitly: first, ‘what is philosophy?’, and second, ‘what is childhood?’

A further elaboration of the first question is bypassed here, with reference to the dictionary account above. On the latter question: in the ancient Greek language, there were many words for ‘child’ but no word for ‘childhood’. The term, infantia, in Latin, meant literally ‘lack of voice’, and was used in law courts to refer to those who were not allowed to give testimony in their own benefit; the term had no connection to the notion of (‘aged’) children (Kohan 2019). As in Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese) all words designating childhood in fact come from this word, a question is put to philosophers, but arguably more generally to all scholars in contemporary childhood studies and beyond: what do we (want to) mean by ‘childhood’, and does the term need to be associated with children? A fair guess is that contemporary philosophers as well as childhood scholars, when philosophizing children or childhood, follow diverse routes in formulating their answers (for one example, see Cassidy, 2010; Melchiorre, 2009 is a review of Cassidy’s book, published in this journal). In his bibliography article Kohan (2019) presents several philosophical traditions for philosophizing children or childhood: the ‘Continental’, the ‘Anglo-Saxon’, Latin American and African traditions, and thinking within a post-humanistic framework. In reading these accounts, the unavoidable question is, whether there is a difference between philosophizing children or childhood. This question is emerging in the more recent discussion among philosophers of children/childhood (see e.g. Kohan and Cassidy 2022).

In visioning a possible converging of philosophy and the multidisciplinary (social) study of childhood, the foremost question is how philosophy, as a scientific discipline, might contribute to childhood studies. The discussion, among philosophers, on the role of their discipline in relation to other academic (‘knowledge’) disciplines and to society at large, has been increasing since the beginning of the millennium. One development which has driven forward the discussion is the rapidly growing interdependence of the disciplines (Hansson, 2008). Earlier, the different disciplines were largely independent of each other; today the interdisciplinary interconnections are steadily strengthening, and integrative new disciplines have developed and are tying together previously unconnected disciplines. This development does not cover only academic disciplines covered by the (restrictive) English term ‘science’ but also a wider range of disciplines covered by the German term ‘Wissenschaft’ (ibid).

The question is how philosophy can be, or become, part of the community of independent disciplines? Dohn (2021) outlines four roles for philosophy (specifically in educational research): (a) as provider of a priori conceptual analyses, (b) as clarifier of the concepts and their implications, used by researchers in specialist disciplines – philosophy as “handmaiden to the sciences”, (c) as interpreter of results of disciplinary research, and (d) as dialogue partner with a voice of its own. The first two roles clearly relate to philosophy’s traditional role as a discipline apart from but (increasingly) concerned with problems in natural and social science disciplines, and in humanities. The two latter roles demonstrate that philosophy can be more than what it has traditionally taken to be in relation to research disciplines, i.e. merely a ‘helper’. The third role points at philosophy’s ambition to take state-of-the art research in the disciplines as its premise and improve their results by engaging in philosophical methods. The fourth approach, finally, sees the relationship between philosophy and empirical disciplinary research as symmetrical, as both are concerned with the same subject matter without, however, their aims coinciding (ibid). There is currently a scholarly movement that wants to go even further, towards establishing a ‘field philosophy’ whereby philosophers leave their disciplinary island and partner with non-philosophers to grapple with a live societal problem (Frodeman and Briggle 2016). There has always been a field element to Western philosophy, these authors write, and field philosophy has both ancient and modern antecedents, starting from Socrates’ time in the agora. The balance between disciplinary philosophy and field philosophy, however, shifted in the late 19th century. Field philosophy aims to rebalance the situation by “re-establishing a multiplicity of sites, identifying a new practice, and offering an accompanying theory rooted in the differences that location makes to philosophizing” (Frodeman 2021, 346).

There is, then, an increased demand of philosophy by and for research disciplines, and indeed, several collective opinions have recently been announced by groups of globally renown researchers for an increased involvement of philosophy in science. ² In the multidisciplinary childhood research field, philosophical reflection is still rare and has mainly centred on issues of ethics, such as children’s moral status and the ethical way of conducting research when children are involved (Gheaus 2019). Examples of progress in a number of sciences in establishing shared fields of research with philosophers should serve to inspire also childhood scholars to start considering questions that require us to combine philosophical and empirical investigations, across the specialist childhood subdisciplines.