Life teaches us that there is more to every fact than the fact of it. So the fact that philosophy can’t give us “the answer” teaches us a useful lesson in reality – that the definitive truth is an illusion of the fact we try to make of it – as if everything is either/ or: this or that, true or false.

Instead, philosophy opens up a reality of multiple truths about a world that is simultaneously one thing and another. It teaches us that the belief in the ultimate “fact” or “truth” is a residue of what we have gleaned from someone else’s bad philosophy.

Mike Laidler