Intellectual Humility: Owning Our Limitations

philosophical writings seem so arrogant:...the usual manner of presenting philosophical work puzzles me. Works of philosophy are written as though their authors believe them to be the absolutely final word on their subject. But it’s not, surely, that each philosopher thinks that he finally, thank God, has found the truth and built an impregnable fortress around it. We are all actually much more modest than that. For good reason. Having thought long and hard about the view he proposes, a philosopher has a reasonably good idea about its weak points; the places where great intellectual weight is placed upon something perhaps too fragile to bear it, the places where the unraveling of the view might begin, the unprobed assumptions he feels uneasy about.1 Although Nozick does not use these words, we might say that, by his lights, most philosophical writings display an astounding lack of intellectual humility. In her widely-acclaimed book, I Don’t Know, Leah Hager Cohen relates a conversation with her students about a “well-read ” and “incredibly smart” colleague named “Mary”. Mary routinely exhibits an unusual response when