Falling in Love with Wisdom

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David Lynn Hall's love of philosophy began with a fifty-cent paperback. Then an adolescent facing an 18-hour bus trip across the great Southwest, desperate for anything to read, Hall bought Alfred North Whitehead's Adventures of Ideas at a rest stop in Pecos, Texas. He didn't have a clue whoWhitehead was, but the book had a colorful, exotic cover, and nothing else on the revolving wire bookrack appealed to him. "I paid fifty cents, boarded the Trailways bus, nestled into my narrow seat and into the vastness of the desert spaces--and soon into the yet vaster spaces of humanity's greatthoughts.... As I recall that first encounter with philosophic thinking, I seem to capture the exact emotion--a mixture of intrigue and perplexity, a congealed sense of awe--the apotheosis of which is the feeling philosophy now represents for me." That Mentor paperback still sits on his shelf, atreasured relic held together by rubberbands. Hall is just one of over sixty philosophers whose revealing memoirs appear in Falling in Love with Wisdom, a fascinating look at how some people became philosophers. Contributed by thinkers young and old, male and female, famous and obscure, these pieces reveal in very human terms both therewards and hazards of a life dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom. Many recall a single memorable moment, an epiphany that changed forever the way they thought about themselves and the world around them. Huston Smith reveals how powerful these moments can be: "My excitement had been mounting allevening and around midnight it exploded, shattering mental stockades. It was as if a fourth dimension of space had opened, and ideas--now palpable--were unrolling likecarpets before me." Others, such as Diane Michelfelder, find their gravitation to philosophy more subtle: "I sometimes think thatone becomes a philosopher the same way one becomes many other things: a lover, a neighbor, a friend, an adult. You wake up one morning to discover