Abstract

This is a collection of eight essays plus one short “ afterthought,” all but one of which have been previously published in the 1990s. The theme running throughout is a plea for a less professional, less exclusive, less technical, less abstract approach to philosophy than the commonly labelled “analytic” approach. Solomon’s complaint against analytic philosophy is that when it does not outright ignore the philosophical problems that concern the day-to-day lives of regular people, it turns them into abstract “brain-teasers” void of any real-life context. Philosophy then becomes an opportunity for an elite group to show off how smart they are. Analytic philosophers tend to abstract away all the rich detail of the real life contexts in which most of our impulses to philosophize arise. What is thus gained by eliminating supposedly extraneous details, so as to arrive at the essential—and timeless?—“thin” conceptions of such things as reason, justice, personal identity, and a meaningful life, is offset by the inability of people to apply the results to what is significant in their own lives. Small wonder then if most North Americans think philosophy is useless and irrelevant. Solomon warns, “[I]t is only a matter of time before more parents, taxpayers, readers, and administrators start to ask, Why should we pay for this? Is this what our kids should be learning? Is this philosophy?”.