Customer Reviews

The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Don't be swayed by the austere title, what this book does best is corral and explain recent studies on what babies and toddlers understand and when: When do they start to feel empathy? When are they able to understand that hitting hurts? When can they be expected to understand rules? What's the deal with invisible friends? It's given me a new perspective and a lot more sympathy for my into-everything son.

It's also a page-turning easy read and utterly fascinating-- you'll want to go through with a highlighter to pick out all of the brilliant points.

Would make a great gifts for parents & parents-to-be!

Have you ever wondered about the inner life of children, how they understand things, what their stream of consciousness is like, how they perceive the world, what their feelings are really like? I watched my own children grow up, talked with them daily, fed them, played with them, but always felt that I was missing a lot about their inner world. Gopnik answered some of my questions and showed me other questions that I hadn't thought of asking.

Gopnick argues, for example, that young children don't have the same self narrative adults have. I remember being appalled by my daughter's inability to describe what happened on her recent trip to the zoo. Gopnick argues that this happens because very young children haven't developed the story about themselves that allows them to go back and fetch prior events the way adults do. When I return from a trip to the zoo, I retain a story about finding a parking spot, paying admission, watching the monkeys near the entrance, etc. With very young children, there is no such narrative, only a series of events. These events are remembered. So if I ask a more direct question, like did you enjoy the monkeys in the big cage, she tells me about the big monkey chasing the smaller monkey.

Gopnik emphasizes the sophistication of children who can easily distinguish between imaginary, possible, and real objects. She tells us about how children can make sophisticated judgments about causal relationships after having seen only a few relevant events. She tells us how children can distinguish acts which are wrong because they hurt someone as opposed to things which are wrong because they are against the rules

Gopnik frames her discussion around philosophical themes such as reality versus fiction, discovery of reliable truth from messy observations, consciousness, nature of the self, love, morality, etc. She rightly argues that although topics such as these have long been important to philosophers, potential insights that could be provided by studying children have not been considered by philosophers.

Specialists will find this book unsatisfactory. There isn't a single graph. There are no statistics or numbers of any kind. There are no literature reviews describing areas where researchers get conflicting results. When experiments are reported at all, they are mentioned briefly with no detail. Gopnik is more interested in the big picture, discussing the main themes using mostly informal language. Just the same, she takes you through some of the toughest concepts in the field and isn't afraid to bring up technical terms, like lantern consciousness, whenever it is helpful to do so.

Finally, Gopnik's wit, graceful writing, and genuine feeling for children make her book a pleasure to read.

The book is a little dry but it provides great insights (backed up by the actual research) into understanding what is going on inside kids' heads. As opposed to what many past generations had thought, babies and kids actually posess tremendous capacity for the information processing, they are very smart and intuitive. And they are also much more empathetic, creative, and imaginitive than most adults. The book provides lots of actual examples of what you might have been observing in your kids but not understanding fully what it means. I liked the chapter about role-playing and imaginary friends. It is helpful to know that that child is capable of making a very clear distinction between what is imaginary and what is real. Some parents worry that their kids would wander off "too far" into imaginary world. The book provides ideas for the easy to do reality checks for the parents :) Great idea to read the book even before you become a parent.

I bought this because I really enjoyed "The Scientist in the Crib" and I was hoping for more along those lines. What I got however, was exactly the same book as The Scientist in the Crib - same experiments, same analysis, only I paid more for it and two of authors of the previous book were stripped of credit. This book would be great if I hadn't read it already.

This book presents some interesting experimental results from early childhood research. (The "Baby" of the title actually means the "Child up to Age 5," a rather more inclusive category!) These results tell us that a lot more is going on in children's minds than scientists had previously thought, especially scientists who managed to avoid spending any time with children.

I wish more of the book were about the experiments. There is too great a ratio of speculation to actual results, and a lot of the speculation is based on the author's experience as a mother, but without the intimacy of a memoir.

Nevertheless, the book is worth skimming for the experiments alone. These are fascinating in themselves, and you can feel free to form your own conjectures from them.

This is a very interesting book, reviewing various research and results of how children's brain's work, particularly focused on the early years. Like the Scientist in the Crib, it is a valuable book for any parent, especially of a young child, in that it will completely change your perception of how your child is thinking and what they are doing and, to a lesser extent, your role as a parent.

I did find Scientist in the Crib more interesting, but it could simply be that having read it first, this book had less new content.

Still, the author's writing is clear and easy to read, and the studies of brain dynamics are always interesting.

I highly recommend this or Scientist in the Crib for any parent.

Although most people are probably already aware that babies are natural learners, this book summarizes recent research that gives us new ways to interpret their behaviors and inner experiences. This new information illuminates the limits in Piaget's theory of cognitive development, as well as other influential, but apparently incorrect or narrow, developmental theories. You'll find information about the existence and development of identity, morals, consciousness, brain development, knowledge, and imagination in babies and young children.

For the most part, the book is quite good and holds interest through out. However, the reason I have rated 4 stars instead of 5 is that the author promises to "talk about the spiritual significance of babies" (p. 18). However, in Chapter 9 she only discusses how babies inspire awe, magic, and love (see p. 238-243), so I found this chapter restrained and topical. Even so, I think it was an excellent book, hence the four stars.

"The Philosophical Baby" is an easy, enjoyable read chock full of great information and insights. If you love babies and kids, or you love truth, you'll find this a great book! I am a philosopher and have a lot of kids; i ate it up. Also I am particularly interested in this subject, cognitive development in the first five years: the sense of self, the difference between rules about hurting others and about how to do things, language acquisition, relations to others, and so on. The author is especially powerful is unearthing the key role played by imagination in all types of cognition. She deserves a special shout out for that: it gets missed a lot.

For me personally, the area promising most fruit with further thought concerns how naturally the child is inflected with community accepted practices through norms of how things are done, even when those practices are far more difficult than a simply rational approach would be -- which a chimpanzee would choose instead. This, along with the importance of language development, suggests that we humans are much more fundamentally members of a group than individuals -- though obviously not to the exclusion of idiosyncratic variation.

This is an A++ book. Recommended to the max!

This book was very good for those of us interested in how the human brain works and how it develops. It was logical, supported by research, and interesting. I felt the end sections of the book were perhaps not as strong as earlier ones but still a very nice book to read while learning several things about human development.

As a philosopher (in addition to the moniker above) and as an impending father for the first time I was really excited to read this book, and it did not disappoint. All of a sudden, I'm excited about identifying counterfactual statements made by my son (well, about two years from now)! Gropnik has done an excellent job of weaving developmental psychology research, philosophical ideas about identity, and the perspective of being a parent into a cognizant text. Why only four stars instead of five? Well, a negative review cites the notion that parents already know all of this stuff (to put their opinion crudely), but I think the real source of the negativity arises from a problem I have with this book as well: over 250 pages, in a negotiation back and forth between different ideas, I began to lose track of who this book is written for. Is it written for parents? Philosophers? Psychologists? The answer is probably all three (admittedly a difficult act to do), but, at times, it seemed liked Gropnik was speaking to only one of the three, rather than all three. Still, highly recommended, especially if you're a first-time parent who is also a philosopher!