Philosophers write essays. Nowadays most of them are highly technical and argumentative. They have titles like ‘A Rejoinder to So and So’ or ‘A Critique of Such and Such’. This is somewhat understandable. Like others in my field, as a philosopher, my work is predicated on having interlocutors – all of whom, with a few exceptions, I have never met. This is the beauty of the written word combined with public libraries. Because of printing I can engage the ideas of others from a different time or place; because of libraries I am not excluded from the conversation because of social or economic class.