I am looking for a way to do philosophy, to make space for it in the antagonistic stances we have taken up toward it in contemporary professional life. I am looking to do philosophy in places where it seems most unlikely to be done, in and around the world in which students learn to be lawyers and eagerly take on a legal world-view that holds philosophical matters in disdain.

And yes, there are students, even those who have set out to be lawyers, fully prepared to do philosophy and make it part of their working professional life. I don't know how they come to such unusual receptivity. Yet, there they are, always to be found, often reluctant participants in a conversation that will expose their philosophical inclinations.

There are many ways to do philosophy. I am less concerned here about the academic study of philosophy, more anxious to get started to see what we might have to say and do as philosophers, imagining the work of philosophy as part of our working lives. It is not academic philosophy that calls me forth, rather the philosophy we are already doing, enacting, actively rejecting, philosophy that already occupies a place at the center of our daily concerns and activities.

I confess I am not and have never been a student of philosophy, not the philosophy taught in philosophy departments, the philosophy of the academic texts. All too much of today's academic philosophy I find unbearable.

Free of the demands of academic philosophy, I have been free to meander, to work with the small fragments of philosophy I encounter in my reading that speak most directly to me. I have been governed, perhaps foolishly, by the notion that I can travel in what Robert Pirsig calls the "high country of the mind" and return to the world in which my teaching and writing take place with intellectual artifacts that can be put to use in thinking about the philosophies we enact in our everyday professional lives. And yes, there is a philosopher, Socrates, who I know as a teacher. But having made no determined study of Socratic philosophy, I follow him only as a teacher, attentive to his walks in the agora (which I have retraced) and in conversations with law students conducted in a way he might have imagined.

There is no escape from philosophy. The question is only whether a philosophy is conscious or not, whether it is good or bad, muddled or clear. Anyone who rejects philosophy is unconsciously practicing a philosophy.

Beginnings