My son, the 11 year old philosopher

Last month, my soon to be 11 year old announced he wants to be a philosopher, and proceeded to read books pertinent to the pursuit. He also wants to play the guitar, keyboard and drums and be a "one man band like Prince" and is strumming and keyboarding and drumming on things. I think it's cute, and I'm also giving him a taste of Mortimer Adler, Will Durant and several instruments to use to go for these lofty goals.

I'm so very grateful to have a son who is interested and capable of reading and thinking about thinking. He crossed a threshold a few years back, after mastering a more than adequate degree of literacy. His literacy has allowed him to become aware of the bigger issues in life, how to bring order to the chaos of life. He is ready to explore how people in the world have asked and answered the big questions of life. I feel very honored and relieved and nervous all at once. Also somewhat in awe of this child.

Once you start making a list of books to read that pertain to philosophy, you have to decide if you want to pursue a classical or more eclectic approach. I am sticking with classical at this point, so my list looks like this right now:

Possible Philosophy Books for 11 year old philosophers (and do not for one minute think this was an easy list to put together):

Fiction that inspired children to think about thinking:
Harry Stottlemeir's Discovery, Matthew Lipman, 1974, Upper Montclair, NJ: Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children.
Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy, Jostein Gaarder, 1994

Nonfiction:
Young Person's Guide to Philosophy by Jeremy Weate
Philosophy for Kids : 40 Fun Questions That Help You Wonder About Everything!, David A. White
The Examined Life: Advanced Philosophy for Kids, David A. White


If he wants to go beyond these books and reference material, there is a next level I've considered.


Books and online info about world history and the traditions of philosophy:

Reference material:
ORACLE ThinkQuest Interactive Philosophy Resource http://library.thinkquest.org/C0110297/
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, online at http://plato.stanford.edu/

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://www.iep.utm.edu/a/

Google Search in Timeline View: Timeline Anything you search in Google can be viewed in Timeline view, try it, you can search on ideas!!

The History Guide's Lectures on Ancient and Medieval European History http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/ancient.html#table


Overview of the history and traditions of philosophy:
The 103 Great Ideas from the Syntopicon by Mortimer Adler

Index of 103 Ideas

Angel; Animal; Aristocracy; Art; Astronomy; Beauty; Being; Cause; Chance; Change; Citizen; Constitution; Courage; Custom and Convention; Definition; Democracy; Desire; Dialectic; Duty; Education; Element; Emotion; Equality (added later); Eternity; Evolution; Experience; Family; Fate; Form; God; Good and Evil; Government; Habit; Happiness; History; Honor; Hypothesis; Idea; Immortality; Induction; Infinity; Judgment; Justice; Knowledge; Labor; Language; Law; Liberty; Life and Death; Logic; Love; Man; Mathematics; Matter; Mechanics; Medicine; Memory and Imagination; Metaphysics; Mind; Monarchy; Nature; Necessity and Contingency; Oligarchy; One and Many; Opinion; Opposition; Philosophy; Physics; Pleasure and Pain; Poetry; Principle; Progress; Prophecy; Prudence; Punishment; Quality; Quantity; Reasoning; Relation; Religion; Revolution; Rhetoric; Same and Other; Science; Sense; Sign and Symbol; Sin; Slavery; Soul; Space; State; Temperance; Theology; Time; Truth; Tyranny; Universal and Particular; Virtue and Vice; War and Peace; Wealth; Will; Wisdom; World

Books:
Heroes of History: A Brief History of Civilization from Ancient Times to the Dawn of the Modern Age - Will Durant
Six Great Ideas - Mortimer Adler
The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time - Will Durant
How to Think About the Great Ideas: From the Great Books of Western Civilization by Mortimer Jerome Adler
The Portable Greek Historians: The Essence of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius (Viking Portable Library) - M. I. Finley

Digging into Aristotle:
Nicomachean Ethics - Aristotle
The Basic Works of Aristotle - Richard Peter Mckeon
The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle - Jonathan Barnes
Understand how Aristotle's effect lived on as an influence on the middle ages:
Aquinas: An Introduction to the Life and Work of the Great Medieval Thinker - Frederick Charles Copleston

Albertus Magnus


The Time Of Our Lives - Mortimer Adler
The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes - Mortimer Adler
The Lessons of History - Will Durant
Aristotle For Everybody - Mortimer Adler
How to Think About God - Mortimer Adler
How to Speak, How To Listen - Mortimer Adler
Ten Philosophical Mistakes - Mortimer Adler
Intellect: Mind Over Matter - Mortimer Adler
The Four Dimensions of Philosophy - Mortimer Adler

References:
An Introduction to Philosophy - Jacques Maritain
The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy - Simon Blackburn
Adler's Philosophical Dictionary -- Mortimer Adler
The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers - Will Durant
Natural Law: Reflections on Theory and Practice - Jacques Maritain
The Degrees of Knowledge (The Collected Works of Jacques Maritain) - Jacques Maritain and Ralph M. McInerny

Finally: understand culture and why we pursue philosophy within modern life:
The Making of Middlebrow Culture - Joan Shelley
Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America - Lawrence Levine

These books seem like a good overview of the subject, at least for now.