Charles S. Peirce taught me that we are no more able to force ourselves to doubt something we truly believe than we are able to force ourselves to genuinely believe something we truly doubt.

Thomas Kuhn gave me (at first via three other writers) my foundational personal myth, what he called the structure of scientific revolutions, which theologians have realized is the structure of religious conversion and philosophers recognize as the hermeneutic circle.

Hannah Arendt taught me that what we call “politics” is in fact the betrayal of politics, and that political life both presupposes and pursues the plurality of persons — (as she put it, it is human beings, not humankind, who live in the world together) — and that if we aspire to be authentically political we must resist indulging that damnable solipsistic urge to reduce our fellow human beings to abstract categories we ourselves have imagined living out grand political dramas we ourselves have scripted, and instead encounter and contend with them as the stubbornly real beings with their own stories, self-conceptions, and worldviews.

William James taught me the impossibly elegant (and deeply American!) Pragmatic Maxim — which I like to think of as instructions for the Pragmatic Move, which goes like this: when attempting to understand the meaning of an assertion, rather than focus in on the assertion itself, instead expand out the practical consequences (what James crassly called the “cash value”) of the assertion’s truth, and this synthesis will give you the assertion’s meaning much faster and more reliably than analysis can.

Emmanuel Levinas gave me the perfect distinction, totality and infinity, in whose tension religious life flourishes, dies or kills.

Martin Heidegger taught me the difference between an emotion and a mood — that is, the difference between a feeling toward an object versus a feeling of a totality — and, in particular, that mood called anxiety which is the feeling of nullified totality, a mood toward subjective nothingness — which Heidegger associated with death, but which I see as the mortal response to infinity in any its myriad forms.

Eric Voegelin showed me an image of time, of past and future dropping away into inexperienceable darkness in two directions, and gave me my first clear understanding of metaphysics (to which I have added dimensions of space and awareness in my own model of metaphysical situatedness in my spark symbol in the pamphlet I’m preparing to get printed).

Clifford Geertz helped me see that understanding (or, empathy) is not an act of directly experiencing what another person experiences (which renders understanding impossible, if not essentially absurd), but rather the ability to participate in their symbol system, so that we can understand a proverb, a poem or a joke — or, as I like to add, design something for them that they love with head, hand and heart.

Ludwig Wittgenstein gave me my best conception of philosophy when he said “the structure of a philosophical problem is ‘here I do not know how to move around.’”

Richard J. Bernstein taught me how to think about and talk about philosophical experience and to see it everywhere, including in scientific activity and in design.

Frithjof Schuon taught me that infinity is not an infinite quantity, and, in fact, is not a quantitative concept at all.

Friedrich Nietzsche taught me that interrogating my own beloved root moral assumptions beyond the limits of permissible questions can transfigure life in unimaginable ways.

Bruno Latour taught me that material realities are also transcendent, and that they, like all other realities, are immanent in interaction, most of all in resistance to interaction.

Chantal Mouffe taught me the concept of agonism: that conflict among adversaries is an essential feature of liberal democratic life, and that the attempt to suppress such conflict and to treat our adversaries as enemies is the root of illiberalism.

Martin Buber taught me that every person is a potential encounter with God if we are willing to relate to the other as a unique, surprising Thou (what he calls the I-Thou relationship), as opposed to an “it.”

Richard Rorty taught me that progress can be assessed in terms of distance away from negative goals, even when we are unclear of ultimate positive goals we are trying to progress toward.