If you look at the works psychologists have done about individual reports of wellbeing, what happens is that if you're poor, you are not happy. But once you achieve a certain level of material satisfaction then income has very little correlation with people's reported states of happiness, things like climate matter more, things like the culture of the country in which you're raised matter more and so the things really, let's face it, like individual temperament matter more than these things.

Philosophers (and probably most intellectuals) are more interested in pursuing what they see as the logical implications of their theories than they are in paying attention to the shlumpy diversity of defensible values that people actually have, and then trying to figure out how these might be negotiated in the life of an agent or community.

On my reading of history people who want to bring us the best are usually the people we ought to be afraid of.

The problem is that the Enlightenment dream may make too many demands on poor African apes like us. We may just not be up to it.

We think of history as another specialization, like philosophy of language, rather than as something that informs everything we do and think.

Most "process" philosophy is historicist (e.g., Hegel) and not concerned with "deep time." Maybe Whitehead is an exception. He may be a really important philosopher for all I know. I've never been able to read him.

Most of what we think of as distinctively human has occurred in the last 10,000 years in the Holocene - a period in which the Earth was abnormally quiet.