"Socrates could never get tenure in a philosophy department today. That Socrates could never get tenure today is an indictment of the system--a reductio ad absurdum--not an indictment of Socrates"

"my hearers always imagine that I myself possess the wisdom which I find wanting in others: but the truth is...the wisdom of men is little or nothing" --Socrates (-470 -- -399)

This New York Times opinion piece, When Philosophy Lost its Way, is a fantastic take on the often-dismal state of contemporary philosophy.

"There was a brief window when philosophy could have replaced religion as the glue of society; but the moment passed. People stopped listening as philosophers focused on debates among themselves."

"Having adopted the same structural form as the sciences, it's no wonder philosophy fell prey to physics envy and feelings of inadequacy. Philosophy adopted the scientific modus operandi of knowledge production, but failed to match the sciences in terms of making progress in describing the world. Much has been made of this inability of philosophy to match the cognitive success of the sciences. But what has passed unnoticed is philosophy's all-too-successful aping of the institutional form of the sciences. We, too, produce research articles. We, too, are judged by the same coin of the realm: peer-reviewed products. We, too, develop sub-specializations far from the comprehension of the person on the street. In all of these ways we are so very 'scientific.'"

"I am, alas, destined for a career that distracts me terribly from my studies.”
--Alexander Von Humboldt (1769-1859)

Alexander longed to live "far away from the so-called intellectuals."

“There was still an instinctive wariness of his brother’s more analytical way of thinking, and ‘the knack that logical reasoning has to kill off the spirit and the imagination’.”
“While [Alexander's brother] was in the process of arranging his life down to the colour of his teapot, Alexander seemed to recoil instinctively against everything conventional and regimented.”