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In Setiya’s case, the question prompted by the trees in the playground was a version of one asked in the 17th century by the German polymath Leibniz: “why is there something rather than nothing?” And Hershovitz shows us his sons Rex and Hank asking questions about the nature of knowledge or the mind that would be familiar to any philosophy undergraduate. Though he writes in a luminously clear and breezily demotic prose, there is nothing especially original about his treatment of these philosophical puzzles. (View Highlight)

His most interesting point, I think, is that these are questions that occur naturally to any curious seven- or eight-year-old, and are not, as Setiya sometimes comes close to implying, merely artefacts of theoretical commitments that most ordinary people wouldn’t dream of holding. “If you’ve got a young kid,” Hershovitz writes, “you are raising a philosopher, whether you know it or not.” (View Highlight)