I think that when people are at their best, when they are thinking, reflecting, cogitating, then they are doing philosophy. So I don't see philosophy as an academic enterprise.

Philosophy teaches us to look at the world again. It brings out at a theoretical level what all plain, common, ordinary people, in a sense, know already.

Obama dreams of a society without power relations, without the agonism that constitutes political life. Against such a position one might assert that justice is always an agon, a conflict, and to refuse this assertion is to consign human beings to wallow in some emotional, fusional balm.

That is to say, politics is essentially about the management of fear, an economy of fear, continually adjusting the level of fear to produce the right level of affect in the citizenry.

Just to say "Well, God is dead" in one breath is to say, in another, that nothing means anything. This is the moment of nihilism. Nihilism is the affirmation of meaninglessness.

For me, philosophy is an activity of thought that is common to human beings. Human beings at their best.

Now, if laughter is proper to the human being, then the human being who does not laugh invites the charge of inhumanity, or at least makes us somewhat suspicious.