I am looking for a way to reclaim philosophy as a way to think more carefully about the lives we live as lawyers. This requires us to "do" philosophy in places where we have become convinced, as is the case with law students, that they can eagerly take on a legal world-view and not concern themselves with philosophy. (And yes, there are students, even those who have set out to be lawyers, who seem to embrace that the idea that philosophy might better prepare them for the kind of working professional life they most want to embrace.)

I have in mind not an academic study of philosophy, but working with philosophy (and imagining it) as part of our working lives. It is not the academic subject--philosophy--that calls me forth, but the effort to discover and explore and revise the philosophy we already have in place, the philosophy we are already enacting, the philosophies we so willingly reject without thinking them through. If philosophy already occupies a place at the center of our daily lives and our work work, our disciplines and our professions, then it is this philosophy we need to explore.

Free of the demands of academic philosophy, we are free to meander, to work with philosophy where ever we may find it, where ever we chance upon those small fragments of value and meaning that speak most directly to us. I have been governed, perhaps foolishly, by the notion that I can travel in what Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance calls the "high country of the mind" and return to the world in which we must put philosophy to use as we enact our everyday professional lives.