When philosophers talk about experiencing a “turn” in their thought (for instance, Heidegger and Wittgenstein), the turn is often taken to be as a philosophical crisis brought on by philosophical thought and resulting in a different approach to thinking.

Increasingly, though, to my eyes, these look less like philosophical crises and more like normal transitions from immaturity to maturity: A boy’s rationalist philosophy (a natural consequence of limited social entanglements freeing the mind to theorize about its own apparently autonomous workings and capacity to intellectually master the world) is supplanted by a man’s pragmatist philosophy (an attempt to make sense of a transcendent world within which he is entangled, has been entangled from birth, and from which one cannot extract oneself especially in that boyish state of  delusional autonomy).