The most important course I took in undergrad was the two-semester History of Philosophy.
We used to joke that it was the philosophy major’s equivalent of “Organic Chemistry,” the class that separates the dabblers from the committed. For pre-meds, Organic Chem was grueling labs and molecular structures. For us, it was ontology, epistemology, and the endless tug-of-war over the problem of universals.
And it was, without exaggeration, mentally exhausting.
The Journey Through the Ages
We began with the major pre-Socratics, those strange and often poetic minds groping toward explanations of permanence and change. By the end of the fall semester, we had hazarded, among other thinkers, Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, Augustine, and Aquinas. The spring semester began with the late medievals and pressed forward. Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and a long train of modern voices whose ideas still hang in our cultural air like smog.
What made the class unforgettable wasn’t simply the syllabus, but the professor. She didn’t just assign us readings; she tried to embody the thinkers. In lecture and discussion, she would assume the persona of the philosopher at hand, answering questions as if we were engaging the person themselves. Ask her about doubt while reading the “Meditations on First Philosophy”, and suddenly you were talking to Descartes. Ask her about the leap of faith, and you were hearing Kierkegaard’s trembling irony.
She made the ideas come alive.
The Lesson That Stuck
If the question of the one and the many (the problem of universals) was the motif threading the course together, the lasting theme that imprinted itself on me was this: ideas have consequences.
That may sound obvious or even trite. But sit long enough with history, and you begin to see how much of politics, economics, and even culture wars are downstream of philosophy. Wars are fought, revolutions sparked, and entire civilizations reshaped not first by armies or economies, but by the ideas men come to believe about reality, truth, morality, and God.
Sometimes those ideas bear fruit that nourishes human flourishing. Think of Augustine’s vision of the City of God or Aquinas’s synthesis of faith and reason.
Other times, they unleash devastation. Think of Marx’s materialism or Freud’s reduction of the soul to neuroses and libido. These ideas didn’t remain quarantined in books. They worked their way into classrooms, legislatures, revolutions, and gulags.
Ideas always incarnate. Always.
From Classroom to Headlines
Which brings me to Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Whatever you think of Kirk, his strengths, excesses, and place in the conservative movement, the fact remains that he was killed because of ideas. Political violence does not erupt in a vacuum. It flows out of a vision of man and society, nurtured by philosophies that either anchor themselves in truth or unmoor themselves from it and are cast about by relativism.
The assassin didn’t simply pull a trigger. He was moved, consciously or unconsciously, by a network of convictions about human dignity, truth, power, and who counts as an enemy. Those convictions were inherited from thinkers, perhaps through media rather than books, but traceable nonetheless to the intellectual soil of the modern West.
In that sense, Kirk’s death (and the other recent killings that have made headlines) is not only a political tragedy. It is a philosophical one. It is the fruit of ideas playing themselves out in the body politic.
Why It Matters For Us
Sitting in that classroom years ago, I couldn’t have imagined that the lectures on Kant’s categories or Marx’s dialectic would someday feel relevant to the evening news. But they do.
They remind me that the culture we inhabit is not an accident. It is the consequence of centuries of thinkers answering (or dodging) the most basic human questions: What is real? What is truth? What is good? What is man?
And the sobering reminder is that when bad answers gain traction, real people suffer.
Most of us will never write a philosophy text, but all of us live as philosophers. We hold beliefs, whether examined or unexamined, that shape how we see the world and treat our neighbors. Our public square is the collective consequence of millions of these private convictions.
That means we cannot afford to shrug off the life of the mind. To be careless with ideas is to be careless with history, with our children’s future, and with human lives.
As the saying goes: Ideas have legs. They walk around the world.
Some heal, some destroy. Which is why, now more than ever, it matters that we walk in Truth.
"Most of us will never write a philosophy text, but all of us live as philosophers."
Love it.
Charlie would like your article. Well said.