ABSTRACT
This chapter begins where Chapter 1 ends, by reading Gunilla Bergström’s picture book How Far Can Alfie Reach?, a children’s book about a child who is perplexed by the beginning and end of personhood. Alfie’s perplexities about his personhood lead him to the realisation of his intimate entanglement with the world. This story, rather than drawing on posthumanist theories to explore perplexities and entanglements as is commonly done (Lenz-Taguchi, 2010; Barad, 2007), this children’s story is used to convey the findings of a philosophical research project undertaken with preschool children. Reading Alfie provides ways to understand how these preschool children’s play involves them with philosophical perplexities that show how they are deeply entangled in the world, and how they use their immediate environment and local practices to philosophise. The chapter works further on these issues by portraying instances of children, going on from readings of picture books, scattering themselves in their world through a playful perplexity, testing rules, norms, and meanings. With background of these portrayals and the reading of How far Can Alfie Reach? the chapter ends by exploring how children’s philosophical perplexities relate to encountering a world and language through play.
