I’m not a great believer in idealizing philosophers or their ideas. For one thing, philosophy is too complicated for any one thinker to get it right – if “right” is even the right word. (Compelling, edifying, or clarifying might be better.) At best, the great philosophers are like the proverbial blind men, each of whom senses just one part of the elephant. Even as a young philosophy student, what struck me about the field was how a few dozen (mostly white, male, European) thinkers could make such compelling arguments for wildly disparate ways of organizing thought and reality.  They couldn’t all be right – yet I also learned that none of them is entirely wrong either. 

I have long disliked the term “liberal arts.” And by “long,” I mean since I first began seriously studying that term and the idea it stands for a dozen or so years ago. My unease is not with what it means, but how it means it. 

The history of the liberal arts, or as I prefer to call it, critical inquiry, is largely the history of books and writing and creative expression. But more than that, it’s the history of the nexus of knowledge and imagination itself, as a civilizational value: of how they are created, stored, and used (or abused). It is a history of curiosity, of openness to the wider world beyond one’s own community or culture. Openness, in other words, to moral and intellectual growth as a human being.