A review by erikars
Il bambino filosofo by Alison Gopnik

4.0

Throughout this book, Gopnik talks about what we know about how babies perceive the world from experiments. This knowledge, in turn, provides insight into some of the most fundamental aspects of human experiment: love, truth, meaning, reasoning. Children, it seems, have a profoundly different experience of the world than adults do, but these differences are what give the most insight into the human condition.

The conclusion sums this up well:

We can return to the questions we started at the beginning of this book. How is it possible for human beings to change? What does this tell us about children and childhood, especially very young children and very early childhood? There are three intertwined strands in the answer -- learning, counterfactuals, and caregiving, or more poetically, truth, imagination, and love. In science and philosophy these three aspects of human experience are often treated as if they were quite separate from one another -- epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics all have very different traditions. But for young children, truth, imagination, and love are inextricably intertwined.