#pholosphy

I think one of my big personal limitations is an inability to maintain a great curiosity about philosophy.

I had one philosophy class in college.  As it was an introductory class, the arguments didn't get overly deep.  I wrote a few papers and made a few comments and the professor said I had a knack for philosophy and might want to consider a career in it.

The prospect never interested me however.  My primary problem, I think, is that I have a total blind spot in trying to read the works of other philosophers, which I would have to guess is kind of a requirement to be taken seriously as a philosopher.

I skated past this limitation in class.  One of the assignments was supposed to be a paper supporting or refuting the arguments of a particular philosopher in one of their essays. I chose Thomas Aquinas, and I'll blatantly admit that I didn't do anything more than skim his arguments for his god's existence.  My paper spent maybe half a paragraph discussing Aquinas, and I spent the rest of the paper proving why no absolute proof or disproof of God could ever exist.  I managed to pull down an A on the paper without the teacher noticing (or at least not caring) that I didn't even remotely attempt to meet the paper's stated requirements.

It's not even that I'm not interested in what philosophers have to say.  It's more that when I read books written by philosophers, my mind completely loses focus.  I start skimming and skipping sessions.  As a result, it isn't surprising that at the end I can't claim to have anything but the vaguest notions what the philosopher was talking about.

I could blame the philosophers writing styles as being rather dry and difficult, but this probably isn't true for all philosophers.  And, at the same time, I read stuff related to physics and science, also described as occasionally being both dry and difficult, with no difficulty whatsoever.