Despite its low status in the American cultural firmament, philosophy, as thinking about thinking (and about the higher-order domains of knowledge, reality, and value) is important. As I argue in Inside the Liberal Arts, it’s the historic, and in many ways the conceptual, anchor of all systematic learning, and the wellspring of many of those other disciplines.  In recent centuries, for example, it has given birth (largely or wholly) to economics, political science, sociology, psychology, and linguistics.