I ’ve always felt a strong dissatisfaction with Western philosophy. It seems to promise answers to life’s most important questions, but delivers little more than impenetrable prose. When I taught writing at Eastern Washington University, my office was next door to a philosophy professor’s. I wandered in sometimes to chat but was quickly repelled by his relentless illogic. I remember his insisting, week after week, that because human beings are the sole assigners of value, everything else in the world has value only if we decide it does. Each time, I fled the room in dismay.