"On What Matters" by Derek Parfit (2011), "Selected Poems" by T.S. Eliot (1964)

With his sentences short and assured, Parfit may seem clearer than his predecessors, but since there is little substance per page to be clear about, the clarity's value is dubitable. Some of his predecessors at least wrote good literature. Surely, reading Partif shall provoke a thought, but efficient that literary provocation will be not. One comes to appreciate Wittgenstein, who thought much, wrote little, had the right ideal of mathematical precision to strive for, fell short of that ideal, and---because of that failure---is still read.

(The early Wittgenstein revealed the futility of traditional philosophic discourse in the scientific age. The late Wittgenstein pursued the only aspect of traditional philosophy to have retained any merit---the collective experience encoded into linguistic patterns---anthropology.)

Physics studies what is true, or approximately predictable. Mathematics studies what is possible, or logically consistent. Short of being a formal derivation of implications from premises, moral philosophy can only survive as an empirical study of what is willed for and by whom.

What matters is discovering facts (done by arts and sciences), discovering the logical implication of these facts (done by mathematics), and discovering the rules for discovering facts and their implications (undertaken by philosophy). It is not obvious that the latter kind of discovery needs a separate discipline and cannot be left to the evolution (of arts, sciences, and mathematics).

To a layman, one of the appeals of philosophy is in its pseudo-scientific nature. Religious doctrines promise understanding without the hard work of science and logic. A kin sense of understanding is evoked by philosophy when it fails to apply a systematic method. Genuine understanding is achieved by an argument with the precision of a computer code; it either executes correctly or it fails. Successful execution requires precise definitions of the objects beyond one's sensory experience; one cannot rely on the consensus innate understanding of such objects. Too often, philosophy borrows its definitions from the vernacular.

Another reason for the layman's enjoyment of philosophy is the seeming accessibility of the minds of philosophy's geniuses. If one reads a frontier philosopher working in the verbal tradition, one understands most of it, if the philosopher is any good. If one reads a frontier mathematician, one understands nothing.

Occasionally, a philosopher would raise a question that does not merit an answer---meaning that whether a particular statement is true has no bearing on how one should live one's life, how the society should be organised, and how scientific inquiry should be structured. Such a question may be infectious, like a mystery story. The inconsequential nature of the question does not imply that it should be dismissed, only that its importance should not be overestimated. Pondering such a question may be a satisfying diversion.

Philosophy that is not a diversion is a heuristic process that, by trial and error, through analogies and introspection, identifies what matters to individuals---i.e., what they appear to be curious about (even if no utilitarian application for that curiosity is yet evident) and what important questions are (even if the framework in which these questions can be addressed is yet unavailable). Such philosophy is perpetually immature.

What distinguishes philosophy from art is that philosophy seeks to establish a common interpretation, whereas art invites individual interpretations linked by family resemblance. Art is a technique that evokes thoughts and feelings, and nudges one towards reasoning, but does not supply reasons. Art is a well-designed distributed computing system. Art's beauty can be appreciated without any formal training; one only needs to have lived or to intend to live.

T.S. Eliot's poetry is a search for meaning that may not exist, a warm-up exercise for prose, a madness's dose, a pose, an irrational book to give the world a rational look, the spectre of an obsessive thought, deflated once articulated.