ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores and demonstrates what the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun calls “the state of the soul” by investigating what a poetical and literary form of pedagogy and educational research, or a humanities based approach to early childhood education, could be. It looks at how Alfie’s perplexities about his personhood lead him to the realisation of his intimate entanglement with the world. The book describes the children’s play, entanglements, and grown-ups’ motherly holding as forms of philosophical exercise that demonstrate different versions of Plato’s cave metaphor. It shows how the ordinary language philosophy of J. L. Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Stanley Cavell can be a non-theoretical way of training philosophical listening to children. The book explains the notion of attention by reading Socrates’s story about how he reinterprets a recurring dream that urges him to compose poetry.
