ABSTRACT
This volume consists of a selection of papers that I have written or delivered as lectures during the past ten years. When Willem DeVries suggested that I publish a collection of my articles in the series Routledge Studies in American Philosophy, I was pleased and a bit dubious. I wondered if the pieces that I had written for different occasions really formed a coherent group. But when I reviewed what I had written, I felt that, for all their diversity, they accurately presented a portrait of my intellectual concerns. These papers range from lectures given for general audiences to more professional articles written for specialized journals. I have kept the informal and personal style of some of the lectures and lightly edited the articles. In this Introduction, I shall comment on the groupings of these pieces, as well as the occasion and contexts of the individual articles.
