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The Life Philosophical

Why Write Philosophy?

George Sher writes some philosophy to tell us.

“Bernard Williams once posed the awkward question, What is the point of doing philosophy if you’re not extraordinarily good at it? The problem is that you can’t, by sheer hard work, like a historian of modest gifts, make solid discoveries that others can then rely on in building up larger results. If you’re not extraordinary, much of what you do in philosophy will… [probably] be both unoriginal and wrong. That is why most of the philosophy of the past is not worth studying. So isn’t there something absurd about paying thousands of people to think about these fundamental questions?”
(Thomas Nagel, Other Minds, 1995, p.10.

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