Anyone who has seen Wim Wenders's great film, Wings of Desire, will recall how it is punctuated by the voices of children asking the sort of awkward questions that children ask like ‘Why am I me and not you?’, ‘Why am I here and not there?’, ‘When did time begin and where does space end?’. Children, Wenders understands, are capable of asking the sort of questions that bother philosophers. So too Gareth Matthews, professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts and long-time advocate of children's rights, argues that, especially between the ages of three and seven, children are capable of posing profound questions of a philosophical nature.

This ability to think philosophically - about the nature of the universe or of ‘reality’, about fairness, to develop arguments and so on - gets left out of most accounts of