Other nations routinely trade in their constitutions wholesale, replacing them on average every 19 years. By odd coincidence, Thomas Jefferson, in a 1789 letter to James Madison, once said that every constitution “naturally expires at the end of 19 years” because “the earth belongs always to the living generation.”

Larmore’s range is evident at every turn in the book, as this partial list of the philosophers he discusses will attest: Anscombe, Augustine, Bergson, Berlin, Bourdieu, Brandom, Davidson, de Biran, Dennett, Descartes, Elster, Engel, Fichte, Foucault, Frankfurt, Gauchet, Girard, Habermas, Heidegger, Horwich, Hume, Kleist, La Bruyere, Locke, MacIntyre, Marion, McDowell, Montaigne, Moran, Nabert, Nagel, Petit, Plato, Putnam, Rawls, Raz, Rorty, Rousseau, Ryle, Scanlon, Schopenhauer, Sellars, Shoemaker, Tugendhat, Williams, Wittgenstein, Wright. One feels, somehow, that the future of philosophy must lie in this method that refuses to exclude any serious philosophical attempt to come to grips with its topics.

I can attest that the man’s breadth and depth are seemingly, shockingly unending.

The fact that we have invented a new verb – “to incentivize” – is an indication of how much this approach has seeped into the culture. “To incentivize” is a much narrower concept than “to motivate,” which includes incentives, inspiration, arousing curiosity, etc. Something is lost if we automatically consider only incentives when we want to influence people.

I could not figure out what Simmel was trying to say. If someone told me Simmel was parodying the Germanic idealist literary tradition of the time, I would be prepared to believe it. Here is one sentence chosen at random (p. 63): “The inorganic body is distinguished from the living one above all by this: the form that defines it is determined from outside… The organic body, however, produces its form from within.”

Well, I do declare! That is really deep and insightful. If you are about eight years old.

Nearly one in three people will be arrested by the time they are 23, a study to be published today in Pediatrics found.