The Philosophical Optimist

              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...

            Teaching freshman-level courses at a community college has—from time to time, at least—provided me ample time and creative energy to think about other things.  One topic of my reflections lately [1] has been Craig Ferguson, host of "the Late Late Show" on CBS.  After some time, I have decided that Ferguson is a genius, if not a prophet (the latter being a subcategory of the former).              My realization of this began when Ferguson had philosopher Cornel West on his show, and West commented to Ferguson on the topic of spirituality, "You have a spirituality in your honesty."   This, I realized, is the nature of Ferguson's genius, the genius of honesty to be found in any good satirist.  However, before considering that, we should consider another element of Ferguson's greatness, one not unrelated to his honesty: his talen...