Bruce Wilshire

"Philosophers conclude that they need no longer participate personally in what Socrates called “the tendance of the soul."

"Philosophy is not exactly science, think, but it must resemble science in its style and mood of detachment: its appearance of being without any particular person’s or any particular group’s biases."

"… our countless addictions, distractions, dissipations of passion that might have served as the core of self."

"In this distancing, are aspects of our own reality as persons deeply concealed, and the concealment concealed? Are many professors of philosophy today afraid to reflect? I think so."

"The Princeton graduate students pride themselves in never reading “anyone who takes philosophy personally or confuses philosophy with things that matter in their little lives.” But being ignorant, app…"

"Kierkegaard, William James, Thoreau, and others I admire are very close to Nietzsche in his condemnation of philosophers who will not or cannot reflect on their own persons: that is, wholly profession…"

"James observed that if one who desires self-knowledge takes exclusively a detached and dispassionate view of oneself, one has already prejudiced what one can be, and, of course, what one can know of o…"

"Not to know how one has become what one is, means one has a grossly inadequate idea of what one is."