Not to know how one has become what one is, means one has a grossly inadequate idea of what one is. - Bruce Wilshire

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.

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

Philosophy is not exactly science, [analytic philosophers] think, but it must resemble science in its style and mood of detachment: its appearance of being without any particular person’s or any particular group’s biases.