I start with the value of clarity.

• The sort of intellectual care that goes into thinking carefully and speaking clearly won't accomplish everything important, as I see it, but it can take us a long way towards that goal. Clarity of understanding can be of great service in practical matters of home and livelihood, of course, as well as in intellectual pursuits from engineering to poetry. But intellectual clarity is also necessary in one's attempt to be the best person one can be, as Aristotle would insist, and in one's practice towards laying down the burden of being someone, as the Buddha would have it.

• Philosophy is the work of again and again revealing areas of confusion so as to resolve them, of coming to think about a particular subject with greater and greater clarity. Any area is open to investigation, and often the presuppositions we start from are the most useful to examine: whether clarity is valuable, for instance, or what it is to understand.

• If ways of understanding, values, and social practices come from human beings, it seems to me, we can only make sense of science, ethics, and politics to the degree we have examined with suitable care what it is to think, to feel an emotion, to be a person. So I begin from a philosophical investigation of the mind.