… our countless addictions, distractions, dissipations of passion that might have served as the core of self. - Bruce Wilshire

Philosophers conclude that they need no longer participate personally in what Socrates called “the tendance of the soul.”

The Princeton graduate students pride themselves in never reading “anyone who takes philosophy personally or confuses philosophy with things that matter in their little lives.” But being ignorant, apparently, of how they (and their professors, presumably) have come to hold such a view, they have no idea of how it might be criticized, or who they are who hold it.

Once, Socrates was a sort of patron saint of philosophers. It was understood that philosophy was a way of questioning, musing, ruminating, living—a way of being a person.