Philosophical Presentations of Raising Children: The Grammar of Upbringing by Naomi Hodgson and Stefan Ramaekers: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Many philosophers in recent years have turned their attention to the ethics of parenting and the moral status of the family. This is, primarily, a book about what it means to be a parent, not a book about “parenting.” But it is also a book about films. The bulk of the book is devoted to a discussion of three films: The Seventh Continent (Heiduschka & Haneke, 1989); Dogtooth (Mavroidis, Tsangari, Tsourianis, & Lanthimos, 2009); and Le Fils (Dardenne, Dardenna, Freyd, 2002). In discussing the films, the authors draw on both philosophical work on the parent-child relationship and work in the philosophy of film, notably, Stanley Cavell’s influential The World Viewed (1979), the subtitle of which, “Reflections on the Ontology of Film,” captures their philosophical approach and style. If you haven’t seen the films, this book will certainly make you want to watch them. And if you have seen them, it may well inspire you to watch them again. The authors acknowledge that part of their motivation for writing the book was a shared sense of disagreement with the predominant ways in which these films have been received by film critics and by the general public. Their aim, they explain, is not to understand the films, but to explore the ways in which they, in Cavell’s words, “reveal reality and fantasy (not by reality as such, but) by projections of reality, projections in which […] reality is freed to exhibit itself […]” (1979, p. 166). Likewise, their philosophical reflections on parent-child relationships, illustrated through a meticulous attention to the detail of the films’ visual and narrative aspects, are not intended to offer “a full-blown theory of what raising children ought to be” (p. vii). In reflecting philosophically on these films, the authors are not suggesting an alternative interpretation of what they “mean.” Rather, they are articulating the force of their own responses to the films in terms of “the particular aspects of them that make visible elements of what we do when we bring children into the world, and invite them to share our world, that we claim are rendered invisible by the dominant account of ‘parenting’” (Ramaekers and Hodgson, 2019, p. vii). Chapter One rehearses and elaborates on themes that will be familiar to anyone who has read the authors’ and others’ recent philosophical work on upbringing and parent-child relationships (see Ramaekers, 2018; Ramaekers and Suissa, 2012; Vansieleghem, 2010). Central to this work is a critical exploration of the ways in which the ethical significance and phenomenology of parent-child relationships are obscured, or distorted, by mainstream, largely instrumental narratives of parenting. The alternative philosophical account explores ideas and experiences that are “an inevitable part of the human activity we call raising children” (p. 5). This chapter thus revisits some critical work on the ways in which paradigms from scientific research in psychology, and increasingly neuroscience, have “claimed” popular and academic discussions of parenting, particularly regarding the language of effectiveness and causality. The chapter builds on some of this earlier work but also develops it in significant ways by offering an insightful account of the idea of “depersonalization” in parenting discourse. The discussion draws compellingly on the work of Cavell and Wittgenstein in articulating the complexities and difficulties in articulating this “grammar of upbringing” and, as such, constitutes a valuable addition to recent philosophical work on the implications of these thinkers’ ideas. The three films that the authors discuss in detail in the subsequent chapters “provide the starting point for articulating” the experience of raising children that these philosophical reflections are reaching for; in doing so, they say, the films, like …