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. 

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.