Almost everybody thinks about philosophy, even if they don't realize it's philosophy and even if they have no sense of the difficulty of the problems, the array of possible answers.

That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre.

In Greek, our word for play is paidia and the word for education is paideia, and it is very natural and right that these words should be entangled at the root, together with our word for children, paides, which gave you your words pedagogy and pediatrician.

And now having a child has been taken out of the sphere of biological determinism and placed instead in the domain of intentional action. Another option to consider and decide upon. And ... not to choose is to choose.

When we call a philosopher distinguished, we are not saying that she is worthy and not saying that she is recognized, but we are saying that she occupies the intersection of both - that she is recognized and worthy; even that she is recognized because she's worthy.

For the ancient Greeks, who lacked our social media, the only way to achieve mass duplication of the details of one's life in the apprehension of others was to do something wondrously worth the telling. Our wondrous technologies might just save us all the personal bother. Kleos is a tweak away.

Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.