I hate philosophy. And yet I find I have written a book on philosophy--a book to help guide my daughters through the world, attempting to pull together my best thoughts. And having written the book, I have gotten much more interested in the ideas that I espoused. It is a kind of awakening for me. My neighbor read the book and said: "There are a lot of points of departure here", by which he meant there was a lot to talk about, a lot to disagree about. I haven't read a book on philosophy in years, and yet I find myself now turning to them--to race along some of these points of departure and see where they go. Right now I am reading "Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly Wrong" by Thomas Nagel. You have to love the title. But all this brings me back to the question of why I hate philosophy. I think I hate philosophy because--at least in our modern conception of it--it has been isolated from the sciences--set aside--as that which is left to talk about after the sciences have already explored all the good stuff. It seems an empty pursuit--the idea of playing with words about topics with no empirical content, no way of checking to see if they fit the world or not. But then when I look at the challenging problems and puzzles in the real world that we face, and the difficulties of simply living a good life and having some conception of what that means, I see that they so often involve a blend of the empirical and the metaphysical--questions, for example, of the "right" thing to do in a certain situation. Even real world policy questions of economics are typically laden with normative--that is, philosophical--content. So it is those practical questions that--perhaps ironically--pull me into philosophy. So maybe I don't hate it, I suppose, but I am not going to admit that to Bella.