Childish Questions

TAoN No. 86: At the intersection of astonishment and philosophy. Plus a new icebreaker, and more.

“Around age four,” Jana Mohr Lone wrote in an essay for Aeon earlier this year, “children start asking what we call ‘why questions’. Why are people mean to other people? Why do I have to go to school? Why don’t dogs talk?”

To some (to me?), this sounds vaguely annoying. But not to Lone, who is director of the Center for Philosophy for Children and autho…