The Philosophical Optimist

            A good idea, once someone thinks of it, seems to show up everywhere.   Somebody somewhere invents the wheeled vehicle, and pretty soon, everyone is using it.   Once upon a time someone managed to domesticate that naturally occurring plasma we call “fire,” and here we are still talking about him (or her, for all we know).   The ancients Greeks honored this man so highly, they made him a god—more than just a god, one of the Titans, the generation that came before the gods proper—and, in some versions, at least, this god, Prometheus, was the same god that made humanity in the first place, suggesting a sort of mythic equivalency between being a fire-user and being human.             Another popular god—one also associated with certain naturally occurring instances of plasma physics—is Thor, the Norse god of thunder (whose very name—in all its various f...

              Philosophy—let’s admit it, folks—has a bit of a bad reputation today.   But why?   What is philosophy, really, besides thinking rigorously and clearly?   And perhaps some people hate thinking rigorously, as some people hate thinking altogether; but clear thinking—no one can argue with that, now can they?   In reality, it is not philosophy that people tend to hate, but bad philosophy, of which we have an unfortunate abundance.   When it is good, philosophy can be as cleansing as a strong, stiff breeze blowing through a dusty old attic on a spring day.   It can make our thinking clearer, even about things where we never had any idea that we were thinking unclearly in the first place.             For example, consider the question: what is “worth”?   How do you get it?   Who doesn’t have it?   And who decides who d...