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The role of the history of philosophy in the practice of philosophy is a peculiar one. In questioning the motivations of a philosopher who begins his practice with history, or has his practice pervaded by history, a point of comparison naturally arises: the special scientist does not begin their practice with the history of the special science, nor is their practice pervaded by this history. No field can truly escape its history, but its contemporary practitioners can certain

There is, apparently common to humanity, a strange and somewhat inexplicable desire to get things right. A fundamental trouble with this desire is that, in the course of a human life, getting things right seems to be the thing we are least capable of. Any psychoanalyst worth their salt would describe this condition as hysteria—under the influence of which we create desires in principle unsatisfiable for ourselves. Nonetheless, this condition is, I contend, the origin of much

For the last month I’ve lived across the street from the University of Chicago Laboratory School, a K-12 institute founded in 1896 by John Dewey. If one’s theories are educational, I suppose it’s fitting that one’s laboratory is a school. According to Dewey, its founding “was animated by a desire to discover…how a school could become a cooperative community while developing in individuals their own capacities and satisfying their own needs.” The attempted development of such

When I was sixteen I decided I was going to be a philosopher. This isn’t exactly what I had in mind. To be a philosopher, I thought, was to dedicate one’s life, and to take as one’s vocation, the investigation of a sweeping set of perennial questions and answers—questions and answers fundamental to human life and inquiry. Faulkner, Nobel Prize Acceptance Banquet Today I am what is called a philosopher—I’ve got most of the right certifications, and I even get a little paycheck