Let me begin this ending in the first person.

In the final quarter of my Great Books program in college, I took my first course in contemporary philosophy. Though the course dealt a bit with Heidegger, it primarily concerned French philosophy, and in particular the work of Gabriel Marcel and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The course changed everything for me about my interests. I became, in many ways, a little philosopher for the first time. The professor, Robert Cousineau, pushed us to think with the ideas, rather than imitate the texts and language. That was difficult. And yet it continues to be the most important philosophical lesson I have learned in the over twenty years since.

But Professor Cousineau taught me something else. We used to have one-on-one sessions with professors after turning in drafts of final essays, and they were terrifying. It felt like an unscheduled oral exam. In our session, Cousineau asked me a simple question: ‘do you believe what you've written here?’ I answered honestly, saying that I believed my essay to be a fair reflection of one of Marcel's arguments in Creative Fidelity in relation to a passage in Karl Marx's 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. There was of course a follow-up. Cousineau wanted to know if I believed the ideas to be true or at least a legitimate and justifiable account of the world.