Intellectual humility and the keen sense of our ignorance are the necessary starting points for genuine philosophical development; therefore, books—e… - Arthur M. Melzer

The philosophical writer stands in danger of harming his readers in the very act of trying to help them, by fostering an unhealthy presumption, passivity, and dependence.

If the end of education is to foster the love of truth, this love cannot be presupposed in the means. The means must rather be based on a resourceful pedagogical rhetoric that, knowing how initially resistant or impervious we all are to philosophic truth, necessarily makes use of motives other than love of truth and of techniques other than “saying exactly what you mean.” That is why, for example, the earlier, classical tradition of rationalism recognized the inescapable need to speak in philosophical poems and dialogues as well as treatises.

The philosophic life—the radically personal effort to see life whole—can never be genuinely pursued as a collective enterprise of specialists.