THE FUSE

What is a personal philosophy, and how will it benefit my life? I taught philosophy for 13 years, and I would hear this question regularly. I realize I could not respond meaningfully to the question until I was clear about how a personal philosophy had benefited my life. It involved stepping away from strong precedents established by academia, which declared that real philosophy involved a series of serious intellectual inquiries. Henry David Thoreau criticized reducing philosophy to intellectual inquiry: “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”