Philosophy has been an important part of my life.  It has been a strong driving force in the way I have approached issues in academia and life.  It pervades my entire sensibility, my relations to the world and sense of self.  As you read the great thinkers, past and present, and discuss these insights with friends and colleagues, it cannot help but expand your perspective as well as critically refine your ability to understand the nature of claims made by others and culture.   You become quite seasoned at exposing the shadowy images and pretentious assertions that loudly proclaim their own authority and correctness.   

With the sharp tools of philosophical reason, one can easily embarrass and antagonize the seemingly confident advocates of public opinion as well as simply enjoying the felicity of one's own powers to articulate the rare and insightful.  In this way, the philosopher can be intriguing, in addition to being potentially very irritating.   Socrates represented a classic example of the philosophic person who epitomized this duality by seducing the more thoughtful to the charmed Elysian fields of high conversation while making bitterly angry, those more closed-minded types who complacently upheld and protected their opinions with self interested pride and unquestioned tradition.

I much prefer to talk with Socrates, knowing that previous beliefs I have come to consider plausible may meet unexpectedly with an opposing argument of stronger proportions that would render my earlier understanding as false about the world as well as my self.  This is what intellectually growing up is all about.   This process can be cruel, as Nietzsche mentioned.  But above all, it is great fun and pricelessly liberating.

Long live philosophy and those who do it!