Sometimes, of course, the artist does give up, saying, in effect, "I've done enough". Prospero declares that the revels are ended, and breaks his staff - his author retires to Stratford. At the very end, Mann did something similar. Interestingly, in both instances, death came quite quickly after that.

I would like to undermine the stereotype of "strict philosophy." J.L. Austin remarked that, when philosophy is done well, it's all over by the bottom of the first page. I take him to have meant that the real work comes in setting up the problem with which you are dealing, and thus getting your reader to take particular things for granted.

I'm a pluralist about perspectives on literature. There seem to me to be all sorts of illuminating ways of responding to major literary works, some of them paying considerable attention to context, others applying various theoretical ideas, yet others focusing on details of language, or linking the work to the author's life, or connecting it with other works.

The point of philosophy, as I see it, is to change thinking, and thereby to change the conversation.

I don't think readers of Mann have overlooked the fact that he was a great ironist, but they have tended to see the irony in particular parts of the novella, and to miss it in others.

I take the ethical truths to be the stable elements that emerge out of ethical progress and that are retained under further ethical progress.

The theory of evolution explains to us what our ancestry has been. It does not explain away our worth. Why should we be afraid to learn more about what we are?