There was a time philosophy was thought a lofty pursuit – a calling that tried to explain the world. But “despite important developments in recent decades in philosophical accounts of thought and meaning, law and ethics, and knowledge and consciousness, the enterprise of philosophy is no longer taken very seriously nor accorded any special status in the broader culture.” Why? “Too often these days we reduce philosophy to confession and intimacy to kitsch precisely because we live without a sense of the democratic res publica.