There’s a (maybe apocryphal) story of a thinker being requested at a celebration what exactly it was they did and responding – “you define a few concepts, you make a few distinctions; it’s a living.” People typically inform this story for example of how base, flippant, and ignoble the tradition of analytic philosophy has turn out to be; but I start with it for the exact reverse reason. I wish to acknowledge from the get go that, ultimately, one of the large attractions to being a thinker is that it’s an indoor job with no heavy lifting, and that’s alright. I’m not from the varsity of thought that thinks the issue with academics is that we fail to be sufficiently self-important, so I suppose it worth grounding all this vocation talk in the extra humble actuality straight away.
As I began to realign my focus, I began to make time …