Want to Understand Socrates and Sartre? Talk With Your Kid.

During most of my early adulthood, philosophy had little appeal to me. I lasted no more than three weeks in a Philosophy 101 class in college, perplexed and bored by the way that far-fetched hypotheticals and abstract thinking flattened big moral questions and all their attendant emotions.

I struggled to see the connection between determining how to best intervene in an utterly unrealistic trolley calamity and how to value human life as I knew it and experienced it day-to-day. I dropped out of the class and returned to novels and conversations with friends as my preferred methods of philosophical provocation. Formal philosophy, with its meticulous tools and categories and language, held little appeal. As long as I treated people mostly kindly, what did it matter what I thought about right and wrong, or the nature of knowledge or the universe? No one demanded clarity of thought on any of these subjects from me, and I had no instinct to provide it.

Until, of course, I had my first child. My son Augie is