Some people think that the impulse to philosophise begins in early childhood: Gareth Matthews, for instance, in his Philosophy and the Young Child (1980). His book begins ‘TIM (about six years), while busily engaged in licking a pot, asked, “Papa, how can we be sure that everything is not a dream?’” ‘Tim's puzzle,’ he tells us, ‘is quintessentially philosophical. Tim has framed a question that calls into doubt a very ordinary notion (being awake) in such a way as to make us wonder whether we really know something that most of us unquestioningly assume we know.’

Matthew Lipman, Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children at Montclair State College, New Jersey, also sees the starting point for children's philosophical development in their questionings and wonderings. ‘Children begin to think philosophically when they begin to ask why’ (Lipman et al., 1977, 35). Children wonder constantly about all sorts of things. They try to cope in various ways—by scientific explanation, by fairy tales and stories, and ‘by formulating the matter philosophically’ (p. 14). They do so in the latter case when they ask questions like ‘What's space? What's number? What's matter? What's mind? What are possibilities? What's reality? What are things? What's my identity? What are relationships? Did everything have a beginning? What's death? What's life? What's meaning? What's value?’ (p. 70).

Part of the impulse behind Matthews' promotion of philosophy for children has been the thought that philosophising is an activity which is natural to all of us.