Childhood

Abstract

Childhood, defined here more or less arbitrarily as the period from three to five years of age, can be examined from the point of view of implicit philosophy and psychological drives. The bare categories of philosophy, the simple yet powerful primitive beginnings that philosophers seek as their starting-point, such as for instance the given, or the minimal assumptions necessary from which to deduce the existence of the world, may be found in the thoughts of the child as inferred from its behavior. The ontological assumptions of growth itself are so monumental that if complex potentials are actualized in a self-directed structure, it may reach out to make connections, to encompass and envisage more and more of its environment, up to the limits of full development.