Reviewed by: Mary L. Gavin, MD September 2011 STARTING THE DEBATE ON THE ROLE OF CHILDREN IN PHILOSOPHY Eike Brock, Michael Thomas, Jochen Ehrich, Juergen Manemann Introduction Curiosity, imagination, fantasy, and continuous questioning: the child seems to be a natural philosopher until the age of eight to ten years, when the initial spirit of inquiry mysteriously seems to fade. <...> Innovative ideas, dreams and endless speculations: adolescents and young people start creating and planning their own new world. <...> Rational decisions, pragmatism, disillusions, lack of time for thinking, and poisonous competition seem to rule the life of adults. <...> Has the adult world missed the chance to practice philosophy and more importantly to understand the child as a philosopher? <...> Philosophical Practice and Clinical Philosophy Gareth Matthews takes up these concerns in Philosophy and the young Child. <...> Trying to understand a philosophy that represents the range and depth of children’s inquisitive minds, he explores both how children think and how adults think about them: “Adults discourage children from asking philosophical questions, first by being patronizing to them and then by directing their inquiring minds towards more ‘useful’ questions. <...> Most adults aren’t themselves interested in philosophical questions. <...> Moreover, it doesn’t occur to most adults that there are questions that a child can ask that they can’t provide a definitive answer to and that aren’t answered in a standard dictionary or encyclopaedia either.” For Matthews, the impoverishment of the philosophical thinking of children and adolescents is regrettable insofar as it allows the potential for critical and creative thinking to fall by the wayside. <...> This in itself would already be bad enough, but in the course of aforementioned impoverishment, further essential knowledge that philosophy offers to each single being is lost. <...> In the Socratic tradition, the central concern of philosophy is the education “of a single being to develop the ability to react to the world”; besides this, according to Socratic-Platonic self-understanding, concern for the soul is part of its main scope. <...> In Philosophical Practice, particularly in Philosophical Counseling, in the conversation between the philosophical practitioner and his or her client, the focus is not only on the primal philosophical question, the question concerning the good life. <...> A special challenge is certainly constituted by the problem <...>