Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism translates as follows: “Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent.” Or for those who prefer a less subtle approach: If you can’t say it, shut up. Wittgenstein was talking about philosophy; and it turns out that, contra Wittgenstein, you can still say a lot about philosophy without trespassing beyond coherence.

It’s fun to fool around with history. It’s sort of like playing with a slinky: you can bend it in any direction, twist it, contract or expand it, tie it in a knot, but it never loses its fundamental singularity, its linear metallic structure. There are many ways history could have happened (or so we presume) and many ways of viewing it, which we can never agree upon based on our different perspectives, values, and habits of mind. 

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.