MOST ADULTS CONSIDER PHILOSOPHY a luxury. But philosophy, it turns out, is what children do naturally, and when they do, they take us back to that remote and almost unimaginably luxurious time when we ourselves still asked loads of questions that had no point. In fact, according to Gareth B. Matthews, author of The Philosophy of Childhood, asking pointless questions is the true specialty of children, especially between the ages of three and seven, because the instinct hasn’t yet been drummed out of them: “Once children become well settled into school,” he ruefully observes, “they learn that
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