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The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children Anca

Gheaus, Gideon Calder, & Jurger De Wispelaere, 2019 Abingdon, UK. Routledge
xv + 424 pp, £175 (hb) £20 (e‐bo...

Article  in  Journal of Applied Philosophy · November 2019

DOI: 10.1111/japp.12392

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Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 37, No. 1, February 2020
doi: 10.1111/japp.12392

Book Review

The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children

ANCA GHEAUS, GIDEON CALDER, & JURGER DE WISPELAERE, 2019
Abingdon, UK.
Routledge xv + 424 pp, £175 (hb) £20 (e-book)

Childhood is an understudied subject in the history of philosophy. While being a child

is an inherent part of the human life, philosophers have rarely approached it as a topic
of reflection. Till the sixteenth century, childhood was used as an analogy, as an exam-
ple or as a test case for other issues and philosophical questions but seldom analysed
for itself. The situation has changed radically in the last couple of decades: philoso-
phers have begun studying ‘childhood’ systematically, and this edited volume is proof
of the current value given to children and childhood as important subjects for philo-
sophical reflection.
With this compilation, Gheaus, Calder and De Wispelaere have attempted to pro-
vide a well-structured and comprehensive account of the various questions and issues
at stake in the contemporary philosophical research on childhood and children. This
volume aims not only to offer a state of the art on the philosophy of childhood, but
also to draw attention to the most novel and under-researched issues on the topic, in
order to expand the routes of future research on the topic, as Gheaus notes in the
Introduction (p. 2). The volume has 36 chapters divided into five parts, each part
addressing a set of questions and issues under an umbrella subject.
‘Being a child’ (Part I) looks at various questions related to children’s cognitive
development and knowledge acquisition, and its chapters address issues as varied as
language acquisition, neurological development, or creative and philosophical thinking
during childhood. Standing on the important contributions made in other disciplines,
it provides a valuable overview of the various ways in which epistemology or aesthetics,
for example, may provide new insights into scientific research being done in other sci-
entific fields such as psychology, neurolinguistics, or pedagogy.
‘Childhood and moral status’ (Part II) compiles contributions in axiology, moral
philosophy, and ethics, addressing foundation issues related to children’s position in
our moral world. It looks at the value of childhood, children’s moral status and rights,
and various specific questions, such as children’s wellbeing, autonomy, or consent.
‘Parents and children’ (Part III) explores the core philosophical questions concern-
ing the intersection between children and the family. “Who should have a right to be
a parent?” “What is it to be a good parent?” and “What are parents allowed to do
with/for their children?” are some of the questions addressed in this section. It pro-
vides important insights into the relationship between parents and children from vari-
ous philosophical approaches, such as feminist theory, or normative analysis.
Part IV (‘Children in society’) looks at the intersection between childhood and other
relevant social categories and philosophical issues (i.e. race, disability, vulnerability, or

© Society for Applied Philosophy, 2019, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350
Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
 Book Review 159

sexuality). Its chapters explore the forefront of some of the most under-explored issues
in the philosophy of childhood, offering important avenues and reflections for further
research. It provides important insights into the exploration of childhood from other
philosophical strands, such as race theory, critical disability theory, or animal rights
research.
Finally, ‘Children and the state’ (Part V), explores the most relevant questions that
affect the relation between children and the political realm. Children’s position as citi-
zens is a complex one: they are inevitably dependent on the state and their protection
by the rule of law, but they are only partially included as political citizens. This section
looks at what the state owes to children, how it should treat them, and the various
political arrangements required to protect children’s interests (i.e. schooling, health, or
the criminal system). It provides important insights into how standard assumptions in
political philosophy and applied ethics may be affected by the inclusion of children as
subjects of justice.
Because this is an edited volume, addressing a wide range of different questions and
issues, it would be difficult to provide a fair and thorough assessment of each of the
contributions in the book. Here, I carry out the humbler task of providing a bird’s eye
view of what I consider its strong points and its gaps, focusing, more precisely, on
what the volume covers and what it does not cover from the philosophy of children
and childhood, both in terms of content and methodology.
The selection of authors is ample, and most of the leading experts in the philosophy
of childhood have contributed to the volume. This is a valuable asset of the book as it
provides the reader with compiled access to the leading figures in the debate, and to
their most recent research. Moreover, the inclusion of contributions that address the
subject matter from an interdisciplinary perspective (see especially Part I) is also of
great value, as it provides an important empirical backing (from psychology, pedagogy,
and neurolinguistics, for example) to the philosophical reflections carried out. Study-
ing childhood is inevitably an interdisciplinary endeavour, and the interdisciplinary
contributions in this book show the added value of embedding philosophical questions
into the larger scientific research on childhood.
How comprehensive is it? The volume is terrifically comprehensive in its presenta-
tion of the state of the art in moral and political philosophy (Parts II, III, and V), par-
ticularly within the normative analytical tradition. It addresses thoroughly most (if not
all) of the core questions and debates pertaining to childhood in the moral realm, jus-
tice in the family, and in children’s status as subjects of justice. I found particularly
illuminating, as well, the chapters that address childhood from an intersectional angle,
reflecting on the impact that studies of gender (Chapter 20), race (Chapter 22), dis-
ability (Chapter 23), or animals (Chapter 25) can have on philosophical research on
children.
However, due to space constraints, comprehensiveness in its contemporary norma-
tive treatment of moral and political questions comes at a cost for other philosophical
traditions and methodologies. In the Introduction, Gheaus notes the inevitability of
leaving questions out (pp. 8-9), yet there are three omissions that particularly troubled
me, and which are worth mentioning.
The first regards the omission of a more ample temporal exploration of the topic.
Although research on childhood has gained systematicity in the last 50 years or so, the
history of philosophy (think of Rousseau, Locke, or Dewey) has much to contribute to

© Society for Applied Philosophy, 2019

160 Book Review

the debate, and lack of engagement with this wider temporal framework fails to pro-
vide the reader with an overview of the evolution of the topic throughout the history
of philosophy. At least one chapter giving a brief overview of the philosophy of child-
hood throughout history would have been enough.
Second, the book lacks contributions from the social constructivist and critical tradi-
tions that work on the topic of childhood. This is especially problematic as it misses
the chance to engage with valuable roads of philosophical research on the ontology
and genealogy of childhood and of critical analyses on the position of children in the
social and political world. Issues relating to the concept of ‘childhood’, to the con-
struction of the social category of ‘children’, and to the structural socio-political impli-
cations that this has on the life of individual children are important strands of critical
philosophical reflection. However, they are left unaddressed in this compilation.
Finally, from a normative political perspective, the compilation focuses on the (Wes-
tern style) state and family as the core subjects of analysis. It does not address almost
any questions of justice for children from a global or from a cross-cultural perspective,
making some of its contributions relevant only within a state-centred Western tradition
of political philosophy. This is an important issue, as it takes for granted, first, the
intersection between childhood and the global justice debate, and second, the prob-
lematisation of the normative treatment of childhood as a universal phenomenon.
As to the first, looking at childhood from a global justice perspective is necessary for
responding to fundamental questions in contemporary political philosophy on subjects
such as migration, the global economic market, adoption regimes, poverty alleviation,
climate change, etc. In order to understand what is owed to children as a matter of
justice, we may need to look beyond the state and the family in order to give an
appropriate answer (Cook’s chapter on child labour is an exception in the volume;
Chapter 26).
As to the second, and related to the above concern with the lack of inclusion of the
social constructivist tradition, the edited volume provides a potentially biased under-
standing of what childhood is, and what is owed to children, due to its primary focus
on contributions that take as a given the Western family structure and values and a
Western-based conception of the good and justice. Engaging with different cultural
traditions and alternative philosophical understandings of the good and of justice
would have been a valuable contribution to the volume.
Despite these gaps, I consider this Handbook an important contribution to the
philosophical literature. It shows the value that studying childhood from a philosophi-
cal perspective may have for childhood studies in general, and it provides an important
contribution to philosophical thought by proving the importance of accounting for
how our general philosophical analyses may or may not be at odds with their applica-
bility to the child population.
To appraise, this Handbook is proof of the stable interest in and value of studying
childhood and children in philosophy. The quality of the contributions is impeccable.
Each of the topics addressed is thoroughly analysed, reviewed, and presented. They
introduce the state of the art and explore the most recent research on childhood. They
all have, as well, an ample source of references for further study in each of the topics’
themes. I consider it will be of benefit to students who want to have a first glance at
particular questions on the philosophy of childhood, to researchers working on partic-
ular issues on childhood (by providing a state of the art of each sub-topic), and to

© Society for Applied Philosophy, 2019

 Book Review 161

researchers of childhood studies from other disciplines, as it provides a clear and

accessible first glimpse at childhood from a philosophical perspective.

NICO BRANDO
KU Leuven, Belgium

© Society for Applied Philosophy, 2019

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