Michael asked:

Please tell me, can any individual be a philosopher?

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I don't know, what's a philosopher? Here's my take on it, for what it's worth. "Philosopher" is derived
from Greek "philo", love (that's rough, actually it's better translated as something like "interest" or
"non-erotic desire" or "have great inclination toward", more or less...) and "sophia", meaning, again
roughly, "wisdom" or perhaps "learning", or something in-between those. My own feeling is that
anyone who wants to think can learn to, to greater or lesser degrees. The problem is that thinking well
is hard workand so is learning to do it. (Now, just why is that true? No one really knows.)

So a great deal of being a "philosopher" has to do with the motivationto keep trying to learn to think,
to evaluate, to be critical of one's own thinking and others'. In addition, if one really gets into it, first,
you get so self-critical that you have real problems with self-image. Are you a 'real' philosopher? One
needs a tremendously strong self-image, ego, whatever you want to call it, just to keep going. That's
why so many philosophers are such egomaniacs; they have to get motivation from somewhere.
That's not the only way, but it's a common one. I mean, imagine being in a profession where
everyone else in it is as critical as you, and usually attacks your ideas, and in addition, you spend
incredible amounts of time refining them, writing them down, then sending them to be published, and
waiting sometimes years to get an article read, revised and published. What do you do in the
meantime? Write another? And go through the same thing? Is that first article any good? Well, you
just don't really know, for a long time, and even then, who's going to tell you, your fans? Right, name
me a couple of famous living philosophers, then name me one of those with fans. In the meantime, do
you think you're making much money? Well, I made lots more as a computer programmer than I ever
will as a philosopher.

So while practically anyone canbe a philosopher, with great effort, why would anyone wantto be? I
can only answer for myself. I love to think, particularly about abstractions, and I like to believe that
what I think about is in some sense important, if I do it well. The interesting thing about philosophy is
that the ideas, rather than influencing society from the ground up, so to speak, like technology, for
example, influence society from the top down: general ideas become more and more specific until
they are realized, finally, in some actual or practical fashion (we like to believe). Technology is the
opposite, pretty much: inventions like the computer start with specific applications and broaden out,
usually. So I can hope that at some point in the indefinite future my ideas will have trickled down to
make a difference in some real-world situations. Of course the problem there is that I'll probably never
know; the process is usually pretty slow. Meanwhile one grinds away at a few abstract problems
(which get broken down into smaller abstract problems — and there the issue is to not lose sight of
the forest for the trees) rather than solving lots of little concrete ones.

Steven Ravett Brown