Talking to Alice about Philosophy & the Meaning of Life

I decided to write this book when Alice, the daughter of a friend of mine, turned fourteen. I wanted to conduce to her happiness in this Wonderland of ours any way I could. The idea became concrete when I read the philosophy manuals taught at school: they were marvelously written and really deep but too complicated and incomprehensible for children and teenagers. I think that we should start differently; listen first to the questions of the adolescents - What is nature? Why human society is organized as it is and not otherwise? What are the limits of freedom? What is justice? What is logic? - and then, try and answer, putting philosophy in a framework of general knowledge and having in mind the teenagers’ impatience. I don’t doubt that today’s young people are much more intelligent and knowledgeable than us who were teenagers back in the 1970s. So this book is addressed to the young and, at the same time, to us who are not young and who think that we know it all although we know nothing.