About
A library of questions, not answers
Little Thinker is a free collection of the big questions children ask anyway, written so that a child can read a page alone or argue about it with an adult. It is for anyone curious, and it is written for children aged about five to twelve.
Why philosophy, and why for children
Children ask about fairness, time, death, dreams and whether they are the same person they were last year, and they ask without being prompted. Most of the time the answer they get is that it is a silly question, or that they will understand when they are older. Neither of those is true. These are the questions philosophers have been failing to settle for twenty-five centuries, and a child of seven can hold one in their head without any difficulty at all.
This site takes children seriously as thinkers. That means the arguments are real ones and the disagreements are left open. It also means we do not pretend that every question has a tidy answer, because that would be the one thing guaranteed to make a child stop bothering to ask.
What is on a page
Every idea follows the same shape. A question, in one line. A short piece of writing that takes it somewhere. A thing to try, which usually needs nothing but a sheet of paper. Three questions totalk about, with nothing printed underneath them. The arguments people actually make, underYes, but…, each with a reply. What other philosophers think, named, with their position in a sentence. And if you want to go further, the real book it comes from, so an adult who wants to go deeper knows where to go.
Where the ideas come from
Every idea and every story names its sources. Nothing here is invented to make a point — if a page tells you Plato said something, you can find out where. Where a philosopher's position is given as a summary rather than a quotation, the page says so, because a summary and a sentence somebody actually wrote are not the same thing and should not be dressed up as each other.
The thinkers come from Athens and Jerusalem and Córdoba, from Kalady, Kyoto, Nanjing and Tunis, and from people who were arguing with their own traditions rather than only with Europe's.
What this site does not do
- No scores, no quizzes, no answers at the back. You cannot get these questions wrong.
- No explaining the plumbing. This is a place to think about ideas, not about how websites are built.
Use it with a child
Read a page together and then stop talking. Most of the value is in what happens after the page ends. The grown-ups page has a ten-minute routine for doing this with one child or with a class, and a table of every idea by age and theme for anyone planning lessons.
Pictures and accuracy
Portraits and story pictures are public-domain or openly licensed artworks from Wikimedia Commons, and each one is credited in full. Where no portrait of a thinker exists that is both authentic and free to use, the page uses a drawn mark rather than inventing a face. Stories and accounts of people's lives are retold for young readers and are simplified on purpose.
There are fifty-four ideas, thirty-three philosophers and twelve stories here so far, and it grows. If something in it is wrong, it is worth fixing — which is why the sources are named rather than paraphrased from nowhere.