Top o’ the Stack. The first joy:
1. There is the sheer intellectual pleasure that some of us derive from thinking and writing about philosophy and its problems. The strangeness of the ordinary entrances us and we find disciplined wondering about it deeply satisfying. We humans like doing what we have the power to do well, and those of us who like thinking and writing and entering into dialog with the like-minded are made happy by these pursuits even if solutions are out of the reach of mortals, as I believe they are. What Siegbert Tarrasch said of chess is no less true of philosophy, “Like love, like music, it has the power to make men happy.”