Good thinking
Famous philosophers are often depicted as taking up the subject for reasons that, in retrospect, seem obvious. Plato, it is said, turned toward philosophy after the execution of Socrates soured him on everyday Athenian politics. The young David Hume became fascinated by Cicero’s philosophical writings. Jean-Paul Sartre claimed he grew up reading his way through his grandfather’s library. Kieran Setiya, a philosophy professor at MIT, was drawn into the discipline in a slightly less traditional manner: “I got interested in philosophy through science fiction,” he says. As a teenager, growing up in England, Setiya dove into the works of H.P. Lovecraft, the influential 20th-century American author of horror-strewn stories filled with monstrous aliens. Though it might not seem obvious at a glance, some of those stories raise philosophical questions about our ability to comprehend the universe; indeed, Lovecraft read fairly widely in philosophy. “I realized eventually what I was excited about in Lovecraft...