John Schwenkler is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he’s writing a dissertation on the relationships between spatial awareness and self-awareness (or something). Beginning in January 2010, he will be Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University in beautiful Emmitsburg, Maryland.

John has written or reviewed books for Touchstone, Commonweal, Doublethink, First Principles, Plenty, The American Conservative, the Boston Globe, and the sadly late and greatly lamented Culture11, where he was a contributing editor and - briefly - a blogger until its unfortunate demise. He also contributes sporadically to The American Scene and @TAC. You can learn more about his academic pursuits here, and find more of his writing here.

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This blog’s title, by the way, is supposed to recall Leszek Kołakowski’s remark, in his 1982 Tanner Lecture “The Death of Utopia Reconsidered”, that philosophers “neither sow nor harvest, they only move the soil”:

The cultural role of philosophy is not to deliver truth but to build the spirit of truth and this means: never to let the inquisitive energy of mind go to sleep, never to stop questioning what appears to be obvious and definitive, always to defy the seemingly intact resources of common sense, always to suspect that there might be “another side” in what we take for granted, and never to allow us to forget that there are questions that lie beyond the legitimate horizon of science and are nonetheless crucially important to the survival of humanity as we know it. All the most traditional worries of philosophers … boil down to the quest for meaning; and they presuppose that in dissecting such questions we may employ the instruments of Reason, even if the ultimate outcome is the dismissal of Reason or its defeat. Philosophers neither sow nor harvest, they only move the soil. They do not discover truth; but they are needed to keep the energy of mind alive, to confront various possibilities of answering our questions.

This seems damn near perfect to me.

Oh, and by the way - I very occasionally delete comments that I find spammish or offensive, and I sometimes go back and tweak posts for stylistic reasons.

(Sidebar Image Credit: Flickr User Arnoooo.)