ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the philosophy of young children. How can philosophy happen in early childhood? What does it mean to hear philosophy in young children’s expressions? What kind of listening does it require? To explore such questions the chapter turns to the ordinary language philosophy of J.L. Austin, Wittgenstein (1953), and Stanley Cavell. In Cavell’s (2005) discussion of Austin’s (1962) elaboration on the notion of performative utterances, he suggests a passionate dimension of philosophising that involves not only “the responsibility of implication,” as Cavell puts it, but also “the rights of desire” (Cavell, 2005, p. 185). The chapter suggests that, in order to see the philosophical aspects of children’s questions and expressions, we need to look at how children’s expressions are used and the several uses they have, which involves understanding the context, the place, and the body. Going on from Cavell, I will suggest that there are passionate dimensions of children’s philosophical expressions that call for improvisatory responses, referred to here as a pedagogy of immediacy.
