"Conference" as opposed to "Philosophy." Why? It is certainly convenient to use Bacon's quotation as a structure for this website/story, but more than that, "conference" speaks to what I have loved most about the study of philosophy.

A favorite professor once suggested that all true conversations include the element of danger. That is, I could change your mind, or you could change mine, or even if we both agree at the outset the dialectical thrust of our exchange could take us both to places that we did not foresee (or even desire). Without the possibility of this risk, my teacher supposed, there was no real conversation, only two voices making statements with no real person invested in their legitimacy.

"Philosophy" unfortunately, is often understood to mean something stale, something abstruse that some poor geeks or fashionably academic types like to consume and then bat around amongst themselves. This is a long way from its original Socratic meaning, "the love of wisdom." Socrates, like his later Christian prophet Kierkegaard, understood philosophy as an essential activity that all humane people would participate in. By humane, I mean a person who truly examines herself as a real, vibrant being, not as some thing that should be attached to the nearest ideologies (abstractions) at hand, be they political platitudes, religious catchprases, or television. No, says Harold Bloom, in an echo of Socrates, Kierkegaard, and all true philosophers, "you are more than an ideology (Bloom, How to Read and Why, p. 28 )." True love of wisdom puts a halt to the abstraction of ourselves.

I use "Conference" then for two reasons. First, because our ideas of an honest conversation are more akin to the love of wisdom than most of our visceral reactions to the word "Philosophy." But secondly, "Conference" illuminates a key part of the love of wisdom--we do it together. No one has all of the answers, so we bounce attempts off one another. Even when we are alone, in really aware thought, we do this by thinking dialectically. We come to the point our thought (which includes the careful attention we pay to all experience) has brought us thus far, we see its limitations, its lack of appreciation for this or that, and we respond. The original thought or our response can be constituted of original ideas, but more often than not, they are based upon somebody else's.

The parts of this chapter of the story that you see to your left are examples of my mind working in conference with others. Some are academic essays that pool the responses of many people to central questions, or wrestle with one (dead) man's single idea. Some are letters that I have exchanged with living human beings. One is an audio record of my interaction with a public. One is a failure, or at best, an incompletion, a casualty of further conversation and a changed mind (mine). All are attempts at genuine conference, the love of wisdom.