Philosophers

PHILOSOPHERS Photographs by

STEVE PYKE

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

T H E FA C E O F P H I L O S O P H Y ST EV E P Y K E’ S G A L L E RY O F M I N D S Arthur C. Danto 2010

Steve Pyke, master photographer of the soul and

ever Ayer’s official limits on the topic of metaphysics,

character of individuals of diverse classes and call-

there must have been so much thought, wit, prac-

ings, encountered his first philosopher in 1988, when

tical wisdom, wide knowledge and stunning clarity

he received an editorial commission to portray Sir

in his everyday conversation that Pyke, who had

Alfred Jules Ayer, author of Language, Truth and

seen life, knew the world, and was already an artist

Logic, a popular classic of analytical thought. Though

of considerable achievement, had never before met

warned that he had but ten minutes to capture Ayer’s

its like. He had not read much if any philosophy. But

likeness, the session stretched into several hours of

such, I surmise, was the range, depth, and charm of

talk of a kind and order of openness that nothing in

Ayer’s discourse that it sufficed to open Pyke up to

Pyke’s experience had prepared him for. Freddie,

philosophers as a species, and to embark on a proj-

as Ayer was affectionately called, professed a philoso-

ect of photographing not just philosophers, but phi-

phy—Logical Positivism or Logical Empiricism—that

losophers’ philosophers—the men and women whose

is often considered tight, dry, closed, cold, narrow,

philosophical achievement was respected by other

barren, and juiceless. It consigns to the bin of mere

philosophers. The result is a unique study of what

nonsense the sublime visions that have inspired

roughly 200 practitioners, mainly of the analytical

multitudes. But based on my own experience, what-

school of professional philosophers, actually look like

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Professor Sir Alfred Ayer, 1988

to the Pyke-eye, to use the artist’s e-mail designation.

guished by a broad cosmopolitanism, and an inbred

It is a thrilling examination of the physiognomy of

sophistication that enabled them to move at ease

thought.

in and out of political, financial, and artistic, as well

Most of what analytical philosophers talked about

as academic circles. His peers were, among others,

among themselves was language, but the particular

Isaiah Berlin, Richard Wollheim, Stuart Hampshire,

social group to which Ayer belonged was also char-

Bernard Williams, Iris Murdoch, David Pears, and

acterized by a sparkling urbanity that was unique, in

Philippa Foot. Theirs was not just a world of lan-

my experience at least, and what Pyke was exposed

guage, truth, and logic, but of theater, art exhibitions,

to in his meeting with Ayer was a kind of salon dis-

and gossip. Their world was one readers of Evelyn

course that may have had a counterpart in Paris, but

Waugh or Anthony Powell would be familiar with.

nowhere in America, so far as I know. Ayer belonged

Their talk would not be typical of the way philoso-

to a subset of British philosophers that were distin-

phers talk elsewhere, and for all I know, the social

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world of Bloomsbury, Chelsea, and South Kensington

testimony regarding the great thinkers of the past

has now vanished.

that they didn’t always look as clever as they actually

But there is a philosophical form of life defined

were. Most readers of the Scottish seer, David Hume,

by a certain kind of talk, writing, and thought, in

would give him the highest marks in acuity and in-

which all philosophers must be fluent but in which

ferential daring, but his looks were another matter

some philosophers excel. It requires a facility in ar-

altogether. A young lordling, under Hume’s charge

gument and an ability to invent examples and par-

on the Grand Tour, wrote that “Nature, I believe,

ticularly to produce and know how to neutralize

never yet formed any man more unlike his real char-

counter-examples. In truth, one can experience phi-

acter than David Hume. . . . His face was broad and

losophy in practice by reading the dialogues of Plato,

fat, his mouth wide, and without any other expres-

in which Socrates, who is not known to have written

sion than that of imbecility, his eyes, vacant and

anything, explores with sundry Athenians—soldiers,

spiritless, and the corpulence of his whole body was

business men, poets, teachers, and others—language,

far better fitted to communicate the ideal of a turtle-

truth, and logic, to be sure, but also beauty, knowl-

eating Alderman, than of a refined Philosopher.” We

edge, virtue, justice, courage, love, appearance, real-

may confirm this by consulting the 1766 portrait of

ity, and how to live a meaningful life. Those are still

Hume by Allen Ramsay, though the art historian,

central philosophical topics, and what the Greeks

Edgar Wind, writes that “the heavy mass of fat is ar-

said to one another remains a living presence in phi-

ticulated and touched with meaning . . . the mouth,

losophy seminars in Frankfurt, Paris, Oxford, both

beautifully arched, expresses a mixture of sensuality,

Cambridge England and Cambridge Massachusetts,

melancholy, and wit; the forehead is broad and the

and wherever else philosophy has a life. The philoso-

eyes calm and clear.” This may help explain Hume’s

phy of all those pictured here, whether they are liv-

attractiveness to women that somewhat baffled his

ing or dead, remains part of what philosophy is, was,

contemporaries. And it is a useful example of how to

and will be. Perusers of this book will not hear their

read a portrait, especially in looking at a book like

voices, but will be able to see, to the degree that it

this. Still, Ramsey’s 1766 painting of Hume was an

is possible, the way they talked, thought, and wrote,

official portrait, for which Hume wore the formal

which etched the disposition of their features. For

dress of an Embassy Secretary. He would have looked

the most part, Pyke shows us only their heads, in

very different sitting in his library, chattering in his

characteristic moments of thought, which some of

famous brogue.

them look as if they are about to express. Everybody looks fiercely smart, though we have

My own sense is that the human face and the camera, as it has evolved, were made for one another.

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The face is in constant movement, and in the course

separate face and camera. The rest is skin, muscle,

of its ceaseless modulation transmits, almost cine-

and bone, which life sculpts into the sort of face phi-

matically, a series of disclosures of its owner’s inner

losophers wear. There are smiles—now and then—

being. The shutter is made to capture this, by ad-

but not the kind we see in glossy official portraits

mitting light—“natures pencil,” as Fox Talbot, co-

of chairmen of the board. Some philosophers have

inventor of photography, called it—which instantly

wonderful natural smiles, which express a complex

draws the emitted soul on a light-sensitive surface.

of thought and feeling, rather than forming masks.

Because of its constant motion, the face is typically

Pyke’s earlier portraits have white backgrounds;

between looks, which is why photographers often

the later ones black. Personally, I prefer the black.

ask the subject to smile, as a way of freezing the fea-

The faces and figures are shown against the white,

tures in an acceptable look, or something like an ac-

but emerge from the black. The entire effect is dra-

ceptable look. Most such smiles are unnatural, and

matic, as in a painting by Caravaggio, who invented

the face becomes a mask. The great photographer is

this device. It heightens the sense that the philoso-

not interested in masks, because they tell us almost

phers here make an appearance from another space,

nothing about the subject’s soul. He or she stalks the

and luminously hover in the viewer’s space. And they

soul and is gifted with the reflexes that open the lens

bring into this space the dense concentration of the

just when the face opens, and the soul makes a flash-

philosopher that has come to be a mark of having

ing appearance. The hands of the painter are never

participated in tutorials or seminars, as listener or

fast enough to do this. Hume, alas, was portrayed in

speaker. It is a concentration acquired in framing

the dark age of pre-photography. Photographers who

thoughts for others to respond to if the philosopher

ask for smiles are modeling themselves on painters.

is weaving an argument by writing or speaking or

What makes Steve Pyke the great artist that he

thinking it out silently for an audience of concen-

is are his reflexes, which his collaborative camera—a

trating auditors composing a response.

Rolleiflex 2.8 Planar—seamlessly transmits. He is not

Since the faces here are those of philosophers’

the kind of photographer we see in movies, clicking

philosophers, most philosophers will know who

madly and saying “Hold it! That’s it! One more!

many of them are. For the most part, I would think,

Smile!” He is as patient as a tiger, no pounce without

few of them have household names like Jacques Der-

prey. His setup, he says, is pretty low tech. Natural

rida and Noam Chomsky or Jurgen Habermas. Even

daylight, with the subject next to the window, with

so, the faces are amazing. Everything combines to

the camera usually set at f8 and 1/8 of a second, here

heighten the intensity of the viewer’s experience—

using Tri X black and white film. A few inches only

the black and white contrasts, the fact that faces are

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Dame Iris Murdoch, 1990

nearly the size of actual faces, and each has a page of

a midwife, able to help bring the ideas of others into

his or her own. On Steve Pyke’s webpage, one can see

the light of day by sharp critique. Pyke, with the same

many of the faces in a kind of matrix of rows and

degree of fascination he has for the faces of philoso-

columns, like a class picture. It is an entirely different

phers, has made portraits of tools—post partum for

experience to see them in a book, with face giving

delivering babies, and post mortem, for probing into

way to face of a similar degree of theatricality.

what went wrong. The portraits of the philosophers

Everyone knows that the etymology of “philoso-

have something in common with these instruments,

phy” is “love of wisdom,” an expression coined in

with their strength, their polish, and their sharp points

fact by Socrates, who rejected the title of wise man.

and edges. There is something scary about both sets

In candor, I am not sure any of the philosophers I

of images, of the philosophers and the forceps.

know are all that wise. But they do have surgical

To turn the pages of this remarkable album is to

kinds of minds. Socrates compared his skill to that of

experience the look of deep cogitation as a mode of

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being. In actual life, sitting across the table from any

surprising conclusions. The men and women look-

of these figures, young or old, male or femle, is to ex-

ing out of their frames, wearing thin smiles, are un-

pose one’s innermost convictions to the cutting edges

relenting. How we are to live, how we are to think,

of minds sharpened in the dialogues that make up

how we are to act are in the balance. Not to mention

philosophical education. Finding the truth may be

the meaning of life, the possibility of knowedge, the

undergoing cruel stabs and slashes, and reaching

attainability of truth, and where beauty lies.

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A N I N T E RV I E W W I T H S T E V E P Y K E

Film Directors, Tools, Astronauts, Philosophers.

point, you are taking the photos of the students of

What role does collecting play in your art?

the students of the philosophers in your first book.

As a child I was never really interested in the prac-

How has your changing relationship with philoso-

tice of collecting. However, being a photographer

phers and philosophy affected your relationship

inevitably makes you a collector. As you say, my work

with them through your Rolleiflex?

has become a series of collections. In it, I collect peo-

I was brought up in a working class background

ple and trades, tools and trades, and of course the

in the midlands of England during the 1960’s. I left

long term documenting of my childrens’ faces from

school and started work at 16. My background pre-

birth till now. I also collected for a time throughout

pared me to play a certain role in society, of which I

the 80’s and 90’s an extensive body of masks, mainly

was keenly aware. In the UK, there was a certain rev-

African, representations and shamens.

erence that philosophers were held in—they had a place in society, quite distinct of course with the one

You have created a quarter-century documentary

I was raised to occupy. It was not unusual to see phi-

history of the intellectual community of philoso-

losophers on TV discussion panels, for example. So

phers. During the creation of your first book, this

I was definitely intimidated when I began photo-

community was unknown to you. However, by this

graphing philosophers. Ayer, Berlin, Anscombe, and

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Quine were intellectual heavyweights in anyone’s

contains most of their mentors and many of their

book and this was utterly apparent to me when I

intellectual role models. They have a sense of famil-

met them.

iarity with my work that the subjects of the first se-

Things are quite different today. Though I am still

ries lacked. Thinking specifically of differences in

very aware of the way my life was supposed to have

the photographs, I would probably not have picked

unfolded, events conspired to alter my expected role.

the images of Hartry Field and of Ned Block the first

And my acquaintance with philosophers has led me

time around. There is something intensely public and

to come to identify with aspects of their journey.

private about those photographs and you find and

Whereas philosophy at first seemed imposing and

capture this during this brief relationship. I think

foreign, I now recognize that both the philosopher

there is more of an air of formality in the early por-

and the photographer face similar struggles in creat-

traits whilst this new collection is a little looser. Per-

ing a body of creative work over time. Prior to having

haps my own editing is affected by my recognition

myself traveled a long course of disciplined creation,

of my new subjects’ sense of comfort and familiarity

there was a certain reverence. I think the newfound

with the project.

identification has ultimately changed the portraits and made my subjects perhaps seem more humane,

Film Directors, Tools, Astronauts, Philosophers.

less of a mystery. To some extent, this can be seen in

Your work seems to presuppose that one can gain

all my portraiture now, and not just of philosophers.

understanding of a practice from pictures of its

As one’s understanding of mankind matures, one’s

instruments or its practitioners. Do you accept this

sense of the foreignness of other paths erodes.

presupposition? If so, how do you defend it? If not, what do we learn from your various photo series?

The majority of philosophers you recently have

I have no more reason to believe that we can un-

photographed have a copy of your first book of

derstand philosophy by looking at the faces of its

Philosophers. How do you think this changes their

practitioners as I have that we could understand the

relationship to you during the session? Does this

complexities of a family by studying its family album

account for some of the differences you perceive

(or the minds of murderers by studying their police

between your first and second books?

portraits). My two books of philosophers are more

Members of this next generation of philosophers arrive at the meeting with an expectation that the

to be understood along the lines of a collection of photographs of a family.

subjects of the first series could not have had. Not

Tools are a completely different story. There is no

only have they seen the first book, but the first book

conversation to be had with a hammer. The experi-

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ences we have had with tools—experiences that have

peers—because of this it was easier to get a sense

nothing to do with my still life—determine our un-

of the figures that stirred the most controversy and

derstanding. And if we have had no experience, often

intensity.

then they remain a mystery, and the photographs of them are of no help.

I have always been interested in series of portraits that become collections. These often seem to me like families or tribes. The Philosophy Tribe is made up

In your recent session with Judith Jarvis Thomp-

of thinkers, which is an honorable profession that

son, she repeatedly asked you the same question:

deserves a wider audience. My series “outs” these

Why Philosophers? You have had 25 years of en-

thinkers. I’m interested in some way of putting phi-

gagement with us—enough to come up with an

losophers on more people’s radars.

answer. So I’d like to give you the opportunity to provide one now.

Each philosopher you photograph, you ask to pro-

When I met Sir A.J. Ayer, he was very frail and it

vide you with 50 words capturing their particular

was not long before his passing. He didn’t speak as

philosophy. I think we philosophers would be quite

much about philosophy, as about his life. But the

interested in hearing your 50 words, about your

way he spoke about his life astounded and fascinated

work in photography.

me. It came to me as I was sitting with him that I

The contents of a photograph are not facts, nor

wanted to meet more philosophers—I wanted more

reality, nor truth. They are a means that we have cre-

of this interaction. I realized that philosophers form

ated to extend our way of seeing in our search for

a community, not unlike the communities repre-

truth. On a most fundamental level one may ques-

sented in August Sander’s People of the

20th

Century.

tion a likeness “How is that me ? . . . it does not look

But there is a peculiar way in which philosophers re-

like me . . . but it is there in front of me . . . it is a

late to each other, their mentors, and their peers that

photograph of me.” Creating that moment of puzzle-

bonds this community together. They are incredibly

ment is at the very least a beautiful byproduct of

impassioned about what it is that they do. That is

photography.

why they seem to form such strong views about their

Questions by Jason Stanley

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PHILOSOPHERS

David Albert March 1, 2010 New York There is a nightmare about science in general, and about physics in particular— that the moment it escapes from the narrow places for which it was originally intended, there can no longer be any stopping it, and it eats everything, and it obliterates all meaning, and it turns everybody into machines. Most of my work has been devoted to making that nightmare as acute as I can.

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Louise M. Antony May 31, 2010 New York When I was young I was always being told that I shouldn’t expect everything to make sense. Well, that’s exactly what I expect, and that’s why I do philosophy. How can matter constitute mind? How can causes constitute reasons? I want to figure it all out.

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Anthony Appiah March 23, 2003 New York I started philosophy looking for answers. But along the way I came to prize exploring the questions. Progress in philosophy consists, I think, in a clearer delineation of the conceptual options, not in reaching determinate conclusions.

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Richard Arneson May 11, 2003 San Diego, California At the University of California in Berkeley in 1967, when I started graduate school in philosophy, you could hardly avoid the question: What conception of social justice makes the most sense? I have always resisted answers that suppose a society could be just and fair independently of whether or not its members are leading genuinely good lives.

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Brian Barry March 26, 2003 New York Authority has no place in the conduit of philosophy. I simply make the best arguments I can for what I believe in.

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Paul Benacerraf May 15, 2003 New York Drawn into philosophy by a fascination with human knowledge—with us as knowers—I was attracted to the philosophy of mathematics by the conviction that, although we had a reasonable grasp of our role in empirical knowledge, no plausible account of our mathematical knowledge was in sight. I have been addicted to paradox, and to students.

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Ned Block May 14, 2003 London You ask: What is it that philosophers have called qualitative states? I answer, only half in jest: As Louis Armstrong said when asked what jazz is, “If you got to ask, you ain’t never gonna get to know.” (From “Troubles with Functionalism.”)

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Paul Boghossian May 17, 2005 New York Wittgenstein is reputed to have said of a book, The Mysterious Universe, written by the physicist James Jeans: “I loathe it and call it misleading. Take the title. This alone I would call misleading.” He may have been expressing the view that many philosophers share, that in some broad sense we know what the world is like, and that the puzzles philosophers worry about are largely of their own making. My own view, by contrast, is that the phrase “the mysterious universe” expresses the state of our understanding perfectly.

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Robert Brandom March 4, 2006 New York Philosophy is a kind of writing. It is a peculiar genre of creative nonfiction theorizing, whose principal aim is understanding, rather than truth or knowledge. Each of my pieces is crafted to create and convey a conceptual understanding of some feature of conceptual understanding. It is an austere artistic calling.

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Malcolm Budd July 3, 2003 Cambridge As I understand it, philosophy is the transformation of one’s understanding of the world and everything of value within it by means of reflection on the nature of human life, the findings of science, and the great ethical, social, and artistic achievements of humanity.

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Tyler Burge November 4, 2003 Los Angeles

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David Chalmers November 11, 2003 London Philosophy studies the foundations of everything. When I studied mathematics, I thought of it as the foundation of science. But it came to seem to me that philosophy is the highest calling: it studies the foundations of mathematics, of science, and of everything else. Of course it’s absurdly pretentious to say that one is building the foundations of everything, or even studying the foundations of everything. Most of the time we are just chipping away at a brick here, moving a brick there. Still, I think that a sense of philosophy as the foundations of everything serves at least as a compelling ideal that keeps some of us going as philosophers.

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Patricia Churchland November 5, 2003 San Diego, California The central focus of my research has been the exploration and development of the hypothesis that the mind is the result of brain activity; that in order to understand the mind, it is necessary to understand the brain. Although many philosophers initially dismissed the relevance of neuroscience on grounds that what mattered was “the software, not the hardware,” increasingly philosophers have come to recognize that understanding how the brain works is essential to understanding the mind. My most recent work, dating from about 2003, is focused on the growing understanding of the evolution and neurobiology of social behavior, and what this means for understanding morality.

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Paul Churchland November 5, 2003 San Diego, California

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Alan Code November 6, 2003 Berkeley, California I study Aristotle’s ideas about reality and scientific explanation. Growing up around space science and telescopes, I was led to the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. I found there is still much to do to understand their transmitted texts, and these origins of our current world.

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Joshua Cohen March 25, 2003 Boston, Massachusetts Philosophy is about possibilities—logical, metaphysical, human, social, and political possibilities. That’s why philosophy is so abstract: it keeps its distance from the world. That’s also why philosophy is a tool of criticism: it focuses our attention on ways the world might be. Philosophy’s focus on the possible is the source of its distinctive beauty, and also its special dangers.

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Arthur Danto November 4, 2004 New York History has been the central category of my philosophy, and the way we define our experience through narrative structures—through stories. The thing about stories is that we don’t know how they are going to turn out, and how different the beginning is going to look to us when we see how it all ended. Philosophers mainly get hung up on the connection between consciousness and the brain, but my interest is in the historical structure of consciousness—how the consciousness of someone living in the thirteenth century has to have been different from the consciousness of someone living as we do in the twenty-first century.

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Stephen Darwall May 21, 2010 New York What first attracted me to philosophy, and holds me still, is its universality. Philosophy is the great equalizer: anyone can do it, alone or with anyone else, anywhere, anytime. It requires no special equipment or expertise. It concerns issues everyone faces, and once they grab you, they don’t let you go.

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Umberto Eco November 15, 2009 New York

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Dorothy Edgington February 21, 2003 London I was captivated by philosophy as soon as I discovered it. It’s a wonderfully anti-authoritarian subject, making you figure things out for yourself from the start, and to subject all ideas to severe criticism, including your own. It stretches the imagination to the limit. And it is an everlasting source of puzzles. The downside is that even on the rare occasions when you think you have managed to solve a problem, you never convince many others.

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Hartry Field March 24, 2003 New York A nice thing about the sort of philosophy I do is that it can never be used to justify wars or oppress the disadvantaged or anything like that. Unfortunately, this follows from a more general principle.

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Kit Fine March 25, 2003 New York Philosophy is the strangest of subjects: it aims at rigour and yet is unable to establish any results; it attempts to deal with the most profound questions and yet constantly finds itself preoccupied with the trivialities of language; and it claims to be of great relevance to rational enquiry and the conduct of our life, and yet is almost completely ignored. But perhaps what is strangest of all is the passion and intensity with which it is pursued by those who have fallen in its grip.

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Jerry Fodor March 20, 2003 New York To the best of my recollection, I became a philosopher because my parents wanted me to become a lawyer. It seems to me, in retrospect, that there was much to be said for their suggestion. On the other hand, many philosophers are quite good company; the arguments they use are generally better than the ones that lawyers use; and we do get to go to as many faculty meetings as we like at no extra charge.

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Harry Frankfurt July 2, 2007 New York I devoted the early years of my career to studying the philosophy of Descartes, especially some of its most distinctive epistemological features. Subsequently, I turned to the philosophy of action, where I concentrated on issues concerning free will and responsibility. I have tried, in my most recent work, to understand the basis of practical reason and the structure of the self.

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Michael Friedman November 11, 2003 Stanford, California After joining the philosophy department at Harvard the eminent British mathematician and logician Alfred North Whitehead published a book entitled Adventures of Ideas. For me philosophy is just such an adventure—one involving, in particular, the complex interaction between philosophical, mathematical, and scientific ideas throughout their intricately intertwined historical development.

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Allan Gibbard March 26, 2003 New York We are a pondering species—not just each alone, but in conversation. We of a philosophical bent elaborate this normal human proclivity, even to the point of obsession. We thirst to work deep mysteries into clarities, in ways that can withstand scrutiny and change how we see the world.

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Jonathan Glover February 18, 2010 London Philosophical questions can be deep, absorbing, and difficult. With extreme luck, we may have ideas about them that others will find worth discussing. Usually our main contribution to society is teaching: not pushing our own beliefs, but asking students questions about theirs. If we are lucky again, we may stimulate them to think more critically about what they believe. When good students repay us in kind, this sometimes means they and we go through life more thoroughly awake.

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Alvin Goldman February 5, 2010 New York Among other things, philosophy invites us to understand understanding. In my case, I explore the cognitive processes of knowing minds, how we know other minds by simulating them, and how we know most of what we know by exploiting the knowledge of other knowers (social epistemology).

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Delia Graff Fara January 2, 2004 London By doing philosophy we can discover eternal and mind-independent truths about the “real” nature of the world by investigating our own conceptions of it, and by subjecting our most commonly or firmly held beliefs to what would otherwise be perversely strict scrutiny.

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John Gray March 6, 2003 London Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?

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Elizabeth Harman September 8, 2010 New York Philosophy can illuminate and vindicate our attachments and commitments.

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Gilbert Harman September 8, 2010 New York There is no special philosophical method and no special philosophical subject matter. Philosophy interacts with and is continuous with other disciplines, including anthropology, computer science, economics, engineering, linguistics, literary theory, music theory, psychology, and the physical sciences.

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Sally Haslanger July 14, 2010 New York Given the amount of suffering and injustice in the world, I flip-flop between thinking that doing philosophy is a complete luxury and that it is an absolute necessity. The idea that it is something in between strikes me as a dodge. So I do it in the hope that it is a contribution, and with the fear that I’m just being selfindulgent. I suppose these are the moral risks life is made of.

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John Hawthorne March 19, 2003 New York Top of my not-to-do list: agonize about philosophical methodology. Top of my to-do list: take joy in the details (and hope for the best as far as the larger issues are concerned).

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Richard Heck March 25, 2003 Boston, Massachusetts People sometimes ask me whether I like being a philosopher. I suppose I must. Philosophy is too hard to do if you don’t enjoy it.

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Jaakko Hintikka October 28, 2003 Boston, Massachusetts What does philosophy mean for me? That meaning came from my first philosophic role model, Eino Kaila. Philosophy was not for him a polite dialogue with other thinkers, as it is to most of my contemporaries. It was a passionate search for “was die Welt im innersten zusammenhält” (the true essence of life). This sense of groping toward the secrets of the universe and of human existence has never left me, although it might not have always been conspicuous in my writings.

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Jennifer Hornsby June 14, 1995 London My main areas are philosophy of mind, action, and language. I take a stand against the metaphysical position which influences most current work in these areas—a position dictated by philosophers’ understandings of the ontology and categories of modern physics. I also contribute to questions in social philosophy, relating to feminism.

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Paul Horwich February 3, 2010 New York “My father was a business man and I am a business man. I want philosophy to be business-like, to get something done, to get something settled.” (Letter from Ludwig Wittgenstein to M. O’C. Drury, 1930.)

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Susan James June 23, 2003 London I think that the point of doing philosophy is to learn to think and act differently. Philosophy changes us by giving us ways to explore our feelings, our beliefs, and our ways of life, and in the process creates new possibilities that are in a broad sense empowering. I try to put this approach to work, both in political theory and in the history of philosophy.

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Robin Jeshion August 2, 2010 New York We philosophers enjoy, simultaneously, the most and the least intellectual freedoms. We inhabit the big questions—what is the nature of reality? how should we live? what is a person?—and yet nothing may be taken for granted, nothing is immune from challenge. Philosophy’s distinguishing value? For me, it resides not so much in the big questions’ multifarious answers themselves, nor, alas, in wisdom attained through the exacting process of answering them, but rather in how it invariably reminds us how little we really do know. Philosophy is, or should be, humbling—and is, for this, ennobling.

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Daniel Kahneman September 15, 2006 New York I went into psychology as a substitute for the study of philosophy, when I discovered that I was more fascinated by the nature of people’s metaphysical and ethical intuitions than in the objects of these intuitions. The interest in intuitions has persisted throughout a career of research, leading me to discussions of human rationality and of the rules of fairness.

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Frances Kamm May 20, 2003 London Much of my work is concerned with what we morally must or must not do and why. (Ogden Nash said duty was no cutie but I disagree.) For me, philosophy starts when one is lucky enough to become completely sucked into a problem so that it opens up and reveals its aspects. One can be very surprised by what one finds and one has the sense that one is discovering a new world.

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Jaegwon Kim March 25, 2003 Providence, Rhode Island To me, philosophy is unavoidable when I try to make sense of things on a certain level. Above all, I want to know why I should care about myself, not about my doppelganger in a parallel universe (or my twin on Twin Earth). Have I made any progress? Not much. But I continue to be amazed that I am paid to think about such things.

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Jeffrey King February 1, 2010 New York I came to philosophy late in my college career from mathematics, via mathematical logic. I was immediately attracted to the use of formal techniques in philosophy. My first heroes were Russell and Carnap. Vestiges of this introduction to the field include my views that big picture work must be underwritten by scrupulous attention to detail, and that clarity is among the very greatest of philosophical virtues.

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Patricia Kitcher October 29, 2003 New York When I was in high school, Yale graduate students offered Saturday classes for (selected) local students. I started reading Plato and discovered the pleasures of thinking about issues that meant something to me in the company of truly original minds. Then, as now, I wanted insight into how human beings are capable of thinking and valuing at all.

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Philip Kitcher October 29, 2003 New York I entered philosophy at an angle—my undergraduate training was in mathematics and in the history of science—and I have continued to move across it obliquely. The philosophical problems and discussions that have always intrigued me have been those that relate to broad human interests, focusing on questions about our scientific understanding of the world and ourselves, on social issues that arise for our times, on the visions of human nature and human possibilities offered by literature and music, on the claims of religion. As I have grown older I have become ever less patient with “pure” philosophy, the sort of academic philosophy that, as John Dewey puts it, “is detached from life.” Like the classical pragmatists, I hope for a renewal of philosophy that will once again make it central to discussions in the broader culture.

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Joshua Knobe May 3, 2010 New York What first drew me to philosophy was my admiration for those traditional thinkers—Aristotle, Hume, Nietzsche—who had no respect for disciplinary boundaries and just tried to think broadly about the questions of human life. My recent work in “experimental philosophy” is an attempt to go back to this more traditional conception of what philosophical thinking is all about, only this time to do so by conducting actual experimental studies using all the methods of contemporary cognitive science.

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Rae Langton March 28, 2003 New York My parents once cautioned me, recalling St. Paul’s warning to “beware of vain philosophy.” (Was he warning against philosophy, or only vain philosophy? You’re condemned to do some philosophy just to grasp the warning.) Alas, I fell for philosophy anyway, and perhaps for vain philosophy. I’ve argued that Kant’s claim about our ignorance of things in themselves is a claim about ignorance of the intrinsic nature of things. In vain—I’ve persuaded no-one. In political philosophy I’ve argued (along with others) that pornography subordinates women. Again in vain—we’ve persuaded no-one. Philosophy needn’t be vain: it helps us understand the world, and sometimes change it for the better. But its pull is not in its utility. As Adam Smith said, “wonder . . . and not any expectation of advantage from its discoveries, is the first principle which prompts [us] to the study of philosophy.”

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Brian Leiter April 16, 2010 New York Philosophy at its best aims for a general explanatory and naturalistic account of human beings, their actions and values. It draws freely and synoptically on all successful domains and methods of inquiry, empirical or otherwise. Such a conception of philosophy—which I associate most strongly with Hume, Marx, and Nietzsche—stands firmly opposed to the conservative and moralizing tendency of too much philosophy, contemporary and historical, which aims to rationalize or vindicate common prejudices (moral, religious, and otherwise).

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Ernest Lepore February 23, 2006 New York Growing up the child of a single immigrant parent always left me wondering how one breaks into the circle of words. Philosophy allows me to turn language upside down, inside out, sideways, every which way, in an effort to understand how it works.

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Isaac Levi October 30, 2003 New York I preach sermons. An agent’s current point of view stands in no need of justification unless a good reason can be given calling some of its elements into question. When and how such changes should take place has been the preoccupation of my philosophical career.

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Bernard-Henri Lévy September 16, 2008 New York

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Béatrice Longuenesse August 10, 2010 New York Philosophers are interested in exploring the limits of what our minds can grasp and our words can say, sometimes to push back those limits, sometimes to sound the alarm at illusory attempts to push them back. A philosopher who perhaps more than any other exemplified both attitudes is Immanuel Kant. But every philosopher, in his own way, embraces both ambitions—heeding and pushing back our limits in determining what we can conceive, what we can know, and what we ought to do. The wonder of the philosophical enterprise is its being a constant source of surprise not only at the world and at ourselves—that kind of surprise is not unique to philosophy, but at the ways we think about the world and about ourselves.

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Peter Ludlow August 26, 2009 New York “Philosopher” is an honorific term that we assign to a subset of the people who routinely engage in activities that are more or less foundational. It is easy to understand why people want to be labeled “philosopher”—the etymology of the term is “lover of wisdom,” and the undisputed cases include Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and so on. Not surprisingly, we tend to assign the honorific to people who think like we do, but when we are at our best we assign the honorific to people who show us how to think in new and better ways.

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John MacFarlane April 30, 2010 New York Philosophy is sculpture in the medium of questions. By chipping away what is irrelevant and distinguishing what is confused, it strives to transform intractable muddles into questions that might have answers.

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Penelope Maddy November 5, 2003 Irvine, California “There are . . . many honest gentlemen, who being always employ’d in their domestic affairs, or amusing themselves in common recreations, have carry’d their thoughts very little beyond those objects, which are every day expos’d to their senses.  And indeed, of such as these I pretend not to make philosophers . . . instead . . . I wish we cou’d communicate to our founders of systems, a share of this gross earthy mixture, as an ingredient, which they commonly stand much in need of, and which wou’d serve to temper those fiery particles, of which they are compos’d.” (David Hume, Treatise of Human Understanding.)

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David Malament November 5, 2003 Irvine, California I am drawn to issues in the philosophy of physics that lend themselves to mathematical treatment. I look for precise technical questions, usually geometric in character, that bear on the issues involved, and attempt to answer them.

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Ruth Barcan Marcus March 21, 2003 New Haven, Connecticut

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Michael Martin February 26, 2003 London

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Tim Maudlin February 10, 2007 New York The relationship between philosophy of physics and physics proper is a delicate matter. Often, they merge imperceptibly into each other. But while the physicist trains like a concert pianist to attack the most complex physical problems using theory, the philosopher is content to learn simply which key corresponds to the written note. He then sets about dismantling the piano, to see how it makes sound at all.

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Colin McGinn March 19, 2003 New York I am perhaps unusual as a philosopher in combining a strong belief in the power of reason to acquire knowledge with an equally strong conviction of the limitations of reason. I am not impressed by the standard arguments that purport to show that we cannot gain access to objective reality, but I think human knowledge has profound and unacknowledged gaps. I think we lack knowledge of the nature of consciousness and the physical world, though we know many indisputable truths about these things. I am thus unpopular with both philosophical pessimists and philosophical optimists. I got into philosophy to resolve the mysteries of the world; I’ve spent my life ruefully taking the measure of the mysteries.

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Jeff McMahan February 5, 2010 New York Moral philosophy promises two forms of illumination. It enables us to appreciate that most moral problems are intellectually demanding, thereby prompting us to question our untutored intuitions, which have often been distorted by cultural or theological influences. It also offers guidance in living well—not the infantile proverbs of inspirational manuals but wisdom derived from disinterested reasoning that can help us to confront reality with courage and dignity rather than allowing ourselves to be anesthetized by comforting but pathetic illusions.

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Ruth Millikan March 21, 2003 Storrs, Connecticut “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” (From Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality.)

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Richard Moran October 27, 2003 Cambridge, Massachusetts I can remember the overcast day when this photograph was taken, but couldn’t say what, if anything, I was thinking then. Not that my thought would necessarily interpret the look on this face, whatever it may be. And while I don’t even know which shot is being reproduced here, I do know that the face in the picture will have some expression or other. But whatever that expression may be, it is something for others to determine, even (or perhaps more so) when we put some conscious effort into putting something across. This abandonment of control over meaning can seem to compromise one’s autonomy; it can also seem a condition of embodiment and expressivity at all. One of the early attractions of philosophy for me was the promise of finding large questions in small moments like these: the relations of self and other; the nature of expression and its complicated relation to the will; amour-propre and the limits of self-possession; contingency and the subjection to “moral luck”; the difference made by saying something as opposed to other modes of expression, including the pictorial and the photographic.

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Sydney Morgenbesser November 2, 2003 New York Philosophy is the way we have of reinventing ourselves.

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Mary Mothersill November 1, 2003 New York “Let us call that beautiful of which the apprehension in itself pleases.” (Saint Thomas Aquinas.)

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Stephen Neale March 11, 2003 London What binds us as humans is as worthy of celebration and examination as anything that separates us—whether as individuals or groups. Philosophy is the yearning to understand that binding and the conditions that make it possible, to discern system and structure in thought and language, and in the external world for which they are proxies. Equally, it is the endless questioning of all structure and system we think we have found (or imposed). With every joule expended, the idea of finished projects grows increasingly alien. Road works come to mind.

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David Papineau February 19, 2003 London Some hold that the aim of philosophy is to construct theories that confirm everyday intuitions. What a dispiriting ambition. In my book, the best philosophy overturns common sense. Often, the impetus for change comes from outside philosophy, in the form of scientific or cultural innovation. The task of the philosopher is then to show how the new ideas reshape everyday thinking. Does this reduce philosophy to the status of a handmaiden? Well, far better a handmaiden of change than a lackey of the intellectual status quo. In any case, at the highest level, as in Descartes and Hume, the philosophical achievement itself becomes essential to the scientific and cultural advance.

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Charles Parsons October 28, 2003 Cambridge, Massachusetts Philosophy attracted me from adolescence, but my direction was set by another interest that grabbed me at age about seventeen: mathematics. So I first studied mathematics, and then philosophy, emphasizing logic, some history, and eventually philosophy of mathematics. Hence the rather spread-out lot of subjects I have written about.

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Peter Railton December 4, 2009 New York Certain inconvenient questions bugged me, and drew me to philosophy: Do I have free will? Can I know anything? Is morality real? Stumbling on Sartre’s Being and Nothingness as a teenager, I felt a great sense of liberation and responsibility. The mind can make progress in understanding things! But understanding cannot replace action: if values are to come to life, we will have to have a hand in it. I worry: Other’s sacrifices have given me the privilege of pursuing thoughts where they lead—will I have something to give in return?

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Joseph Raz February 21, 2003 London What attracted me to philosophy? Perhaps a desire to understand whether we can coherently be aware of ourselves both as products of natural processes and as agents who intentionally affect the way things are with us and in the world. A simple question whose many ramifications are luckily extremely puzzling.

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Richard Rorty May 7, 2003 Oxford Just as poetry in English is a conversation between Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Yeats, and the rest, so philosophy in the West is a conversation between Parmenides, Plato, Augustine, Hume, Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and the rest. To be a philosopher in our part of the world is to get in on that conversation.

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Gideon Rosen October 30, 2003 New York I began in the philosophy of mathematics, where I was gripped by the shocking thought that reflection on mathematics might give us reasons for believing in things we cannot see. Lately I’ve drifted into ethics, a very different subject, which nonetheless presents the same shocking spectacle. The moral world is every bit as invisible as the mathematical; and yet we know a great deal about it, and philosophical reflection can extend that knowledge. I’m a scientifically-minded atheistic materialist by temperament, but I’m persuaded that in ethics and mathematics the object of our knowledge must be “transcendent.” How is this knowledge possible? I don’t know, but it strikes me as one of the best open questions in philosophy.

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Ian Rumfitt May 8, 2003 London Philosophy is not a discipline in the way that mathematics and history are: there are no philosophical axioms, nor even agreed methods for answering philosophical questions. Those questions are born of inchoate puzzlement, and what is most needed in addressing them is a delicate balance of imagination and scruple. One needs imagination to find formulations of a problem that get to the heart of the puzzlement, and to find solutions that truly lay that puzzlement to rest. And one must be scrupulous in rejecting both statements of the problem that fail to make sense, and shallow proposals for its solution. Maintaining this balance is hard, but in thinking about philosophical questions one has the reward of exploring fascinating intellectual pathways that never come to an end.

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Thomas Scanlon October 28, 2003 Boston, Massachusetts Philosophers are sometimes seen as foolish, or tiresome, because they are always making distinctions. But the failure to see important distinctions forecloses alternatives, and leaves us prisoners of our own thoughts. So it is an important— and even liberating—task of philosophy to identify these distinctions, and struggle to get them right.

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Stephen Schiffer March 26, 2003 New York I first got interested in philosophy because I wanted to know what was the meaning of life. When I learned a little philosophy, I realized that, in so far as it could be made clear, that question had an easy answer (none). I then became obsessed with the more daunting attempt to understand how words and thoughts have meaning. So far I’ve written three books on that subject—Meaning (1972), Remnants of Meaning (1987), and The Things We Mean (2003). I’m confident that if I live long enough I’ll feel the need to write a fourth.

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Mark Schroeder June 17, 2010 New York Doing philosophy well is as much about creativity, preparation, and imagination as about rigor and argument, as important as those are. If you want to see something different from what others have already seen, you need to stand someplace different.

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Roger Scruton July 31, 2003 Wiltshire, U.K. I see philosophy as the attempt to understand the human condition, which means, in the times in which we live, the attempt to rescue human understanding from pseudo-sciences and to show the role of religion, art, and culture in conveying the knowledge on which we depend. My own aim has been the deconstruction of deconstruction, so as to put something constructive in its place.

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Ted Sider February 1, 2007 New York I came to philosophy through a struggle with religion. Which of two masters to serve? Socrates demands commitment to truth; god, commitment to god. My philosophical interests have since become more academic, but the Socratic ideal remains deeply personal—almost religious.

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Susanna Siegel May 17, 2010 New York Philosophy does not feel like a solitary activity, even when you’re doing it by yourself. A line of thought presents itself, then an opposing line of thought stands up to it. From the inside it feels like a discussion where the speakers get buffeted about by the structure of inquiry.

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Peter Singer March 20, 2003 New York Many people haven’t thought much about their ethical views—about why they think some things are wrong and others are right. They may have thought about particular issues, like euthanasia, or the treatment of animals, or aid for the poor, but they haven’t asked basic questions like “What makes killing wrong?” I’m interested in stimulating people to ask these more fundamental questions. It often turns out to be unexpectedly difficult to defend conventional ethical views, and that can lead to some controversial conclusions.

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Quentin Skinner May 8, 2003 New York I am not a proper philosopher but merely an historian of philosophy. I have chiefly written about the acquisition and evolution of such concepts as freedom, representation, citizenship and the state. These concepts have such complex histories that they resist definition; we can only hope to understand them historically. What I really believe is thus that the alleged distinction between being a proper philosopher and being a mere historian of philosophy makes little sense.

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Michael Smith June 1, 2010 New York Despite practicing the method of avoidance when you do philosophy—not taking a stand on issues that are strictly irrelevant to the questions you’re asking—the demand that philosophical thinking be systematic inevitably leads you to make all sorts of surprising connections. Though this makes doing philosophy especially hard, it is also what makes it completely exhilarating.

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Scott Soames May 31, 2010 New York My work in the recent history of philosophy attempts to identify instances of genuine progress and the advancement of knowledge in this most contentious of disciplines, while articulating what I take to be the emerging conception of philosophy in our era—in which the grand all-encompassing systems of solitary philosophical geniuses of the past give way to collaborative syntheses of overlapping subsystems of different but related areas of philosophical inquiry that, in their totality, are beyond the power of any single mind to produce, or fully comprehend. My more specialized efforts in the philosophy of language on the concepts of truth, reference, meaning, assertion, presupposition, vagueness, and possibility are aimed at constructing a theoretical framework for the scientific study of language and information that is the common goal of philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists.

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Elliott Sober November 7, 2003 Stanford, California Parsimony was the first philosophical puzzle that got me going.  As an undergraduate studying literature, I was fascinated by the role of apparently aesthetic criteria in scientific inference.  Soon thereafter I drifted into philosophy of biology, and that is where I have stayed, with occasional forays into broader questions about reductionism, causality, explanation, mind, probability, and evidence.

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Ernest Sosa March 25, 2003 Providence, Rhode Island What killed the cat is, for The Philosopher, a defining desire of the rational animal. What is this thing that all men, and women, want by nature? Can we have it? How? Why is it worth having? What is its distinctive value, if any? Much of my own curiosity has been spent on these questions. What are the nature, extent, conditions, and value of human knowledge?

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Dan Sperber February 26, 2003 London The sciences are capable of giving us a special kind of intellectual pleasure: that of seeing the world in a light that first disconcerts, but then forces reflection, and deepens our knowledge while relativising it. I wish the social sciences would, more often, give us pleasure of this kind.

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Robert Stalnaker March 25, 2003 Boston, Massachusetts My philosophical preoccupation has been, and continues to be, the problem of intentionality—the problem of saying what it is to represent the world in both speech and thought. The problem expands, since one can never fully disentangle questions about the nature of representation from questions about the nature of what is represented. We can describe and think about the world only with the materials we find in it.

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Jason Stanley March 7, 2003 Oxford Perhaps alone among the animals, we have the capacity to communicate with one another with the use of sentences never before used, to acquire knowledge of complex truths, and to use the knowledge we acquire to act autonomously. My work has been devoted to explaining the nature and function of these precious gifts, without losing sight of the fact that we too are animals.

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Stephen Stich March 19, 2003 New York The idea that philosophy could be kept apart from the sciences would have been dismissed out of hand by most of the great philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But many contemporary philosophers believe they can practice their craft without knowing what is going on in the natural and social sciences. If facts are needed, they rely on their “intuition,” or they simply invent them. The results of philosophy done in this way are typically sterile and often silly. There are no proprietary philosophical questions that are worth answering, nor is there any productive philosophical method that does not engage the sciences. But there are lots of deeply important (and fascinating and frustrating) questions about minds, morals, language, culture, and more. To make progress on them we need to use anything that science can tell us, and any method that works.

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Galen Strawson March 7, 2003 Oxford Philosophy is one of the great sciences of reality. It has the same goal as natural science. Both seek to give true accounts of how things are in reality. Reality is huge (quite independently of its spatio-temporal dimensions), and many truths about it can be established a priori, without empirical experiment. The structure of self-consciousness or free will is as much a matter for investigation as the structure of the proton. Even logic is (as Arthur Prior said) about the real world. Schopenhauer is right: “Philosophy is world-wisdom; its problem is the world.” For every gram of truth in philosophy there is a ton of rubbish. When philosophy is done well it’s a matter of common sense, deep common sense. It seems to me an intensely sensual activity. It’s a very concrete affair. It’s like being an explorer in the fifteenth century on a planet a thousand times the size of the earth. It makes one’s mind spacious, in some peculiar manner, and this is not surprising—it would be very odd if intense training of the mind didn’t change the form and abilities of the mind just as much as intense training of the body changes the form and abilities of the body.

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Michael Strevens November 7, 2003 Stanford, California The point of philosophy is to defy common sense.

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Barry Stroud July 31, 2003 Oxford Often the worst thing to do with what looks like a real philosophical question is to answer it. It can get in the way of fuller understanding of what the problem really is and where it comes from.

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Patrick Suppes November 7, 2003 Stanford, California Above all, I think of philosophy as focused on problems of a fundamental conceptual kind in any area of experience or thought. There is no special philosophical method, but as in every discipline, from quantum mechanics to the history of art, there is a significant accumulation in philosophy of methods of analysis that characterize the practice of it, ill- defined though such practices may be. To make predictions about philosophy is rash, but, all the same, from a purely intellectual standpoint, I am willing to bet on the conceptual impact that will follow in this century, and perhaps the next as well, from untangling the intricacies of how the brain works.

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Judith Thomson April 14, 2010 Boston

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Jeremy Waldron June 17, 2010 New York Law is a much more important thing than most legal and moral philosophers allow. A commitment to govern by law represents a momentous shift in human affairs from brute force to respect for human dignity. Not that we abandon force exactly, but we embark on the paradoxical enterprise of respectful coercion.

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Brian Weatherson February 9, 2010 New York Some philosophers approach puzzles with tools crafted from logic and mathematics: tools like probability and utility functions, or modal and nonclassical logics. Other philosophers approach them by deploying familiar folk concepts; concepts like belief, desire, and reason. I enjoy working on the relationship between these traditions. I think each group has a lot to learn from the other, and indeed that the groups have been learning a lot from each other in recent years. The philosophers I most admire are able to move smoothly between these different traditions, revealing more aspects of the truth at each step.

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Robert Williams February 24, 2010 London Philosophical puzzles can be tackled with all sorts of tools. Some techniques are drawn from traditional a prioristic philosophy, some borrowed from other disciplines. Considerations that are clear, rigorous, and on-topic must be engaged with whether or not they fit a preconceived image of what philosophical argument should be. Philosophers should be magpies, I think.

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Tim Williamson March 7, 2003 Oxford Logic resembles good poetry: a precise and radical imagination, an elegant and powerful form, exactly the right expressions in exactly the right order, subtle variations on a theme, the unfamiliar articulation of the familiar, reflection in language on language and its relation to the world, depth achieved through scrupulous accuracy.

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Susan Wolf June 1, 2010 New York Philosophy asks you to examine the values and ideas that you take for granted. Often, you discover that you don’t understand things you had formerly thought were perfectly clear. Trying to achieve understanding and clarity, and, sometimes, succeeding, is the intellectual equivalent of running a marathon—painful, but in an intense and pleasurable way.

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Jonathan Wolff February 28, 2003 London I was drawn to philosophy by the pressing need to question conventional wisdom. At some point conventional wisdom got the upper hand. Now I’m particularly interested in ethical and political issues where people often seem sure that they know what should be done, without being able to say why. Much of my work concerns looking for concepts and theories in which we can express the different options open to us. I’m no longer interested in the question of whether such work is authentically philosophical.

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Crispin Wright February 11, 2010 New York I have never understood Wittgenstein’s idea that philosophy should leave ordinary thought and talk alone. Just as well that the evolutionary penalties for the muddles, schisms, and contradictions that pervade our conceptual lives seem to have been so much milder than they would be for matching levels of bodily dysfunction! But I agree that it is when it focuses on trying to unravel this heritage of “knots of the understanding,” rather than indulge in the strange conceit of armchair superexplanations, that philosophy stands to advance our understanding.

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Stephen Yablo March 26, 2003 Cambridge, Massachusetts A philosopher is like a fly buzzing around in a fly bottle, according to Wittgenstein. A theory of the bottle, it doesn’t need. What it needs is to be shown the way out. Kant has an almost opposite metaphor. He imagines a dove resentful about air resistance; it could fly better, surely, if the air would just get out of the way. A lot of philosophy is these two metaphors battling it out. You are always trying to break free of something. This makes sense if you’re the bottled-up fly. But not if you’re the ungrateful dove. It can be very hard to tell.

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Slavoj Zizek November 21, 2007 New York I hate philosophy, but I cannot find peace if I do not get rid of a philosophical problem. Philosophy is for me like women: they are impossible, but it is even more difficult without them. I am only happy between the writing of two books: then I relax . . . and start thinking of philosophy.

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Elizabeth and Gilbert Harman September 8, 2010 New York

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Sally Haslanger, Stephen Yablo July 14, 2010 New York

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