Every philosophy is a philosophy of some kind of life.

For too many generations philosophers have philosophized about philosophizing to philosophers philosophizing about philosophizing.

This has turned philosophy into something exasperatingly inapplicable to anything important to anyone except a professional academic philosopher.

My belief (or self-interested prejudice) is that being a philosopher who philosophizes a life of human-centered design is a great privilege at this time in our culture.

Human-centered design lives at the intersection of many of our most problematic oppositions: theory-vs-practice, objectivity-vs-subjective, intuitive-vs-methodical, individual-vs-collective, revolution-vs-evolution, symbolic-vs-real, narrative-vs-fact, qualitative-vs-quantitative, holism-vs-atomism, coercion-vs-persuasion, technology-vs-humanities, natural-vs-artificial . . . , etc.

My philosophy feeds on the live problems and anxious perplexities that seize groups of diverse people when they collaborate to improve the lives of other people by changing social situations — physically, practically, symbolically and emotionally — and in this effort become so desperate to succeed that they are willing to stake or sacrifice their own cozy worldviews for the sake of sharing understandings with others.

I am convinced that philosophy can (and will soon) regain its relevance. It just needs a diet of something other than its own self-gorged self.