the self, knowledge, all be here only to disappear? Surely such an outrage cannot be, so there must be a realm where it is not; hence transcendence. Augustine was scandalized that we mortals prefer to shore up these worldly rotting treasures rather than investing in the incorruptible divine. Descartes was shocked at the poor education he had paid so much for and set out to reform the schools by re-forming knowledge itself. Perhaps philosophy begins in scandal rather than in wonder. And

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... y's response to this shock, whether it be scandal or wonder, has always been to attempt to defuse it. Th e quintessential philosophical attitude is summed up in Aristotle's analysis of questioning: philosophy begins in wonder but "must end up in the contrary and (according to the proverb) the better state, the one that people achieve by learning. " 3 Wonder is useful as an initiating motivation because it starts us investigating, but it's like an itch that needs to be scratched. If reality presents us with a scandal, we must set up a political war room that will come up with a solution that dispels it. Questions are to be answered, puzzles to be solved, confusions resolved. Wonder, perplexity, inquiries-ladders to be climbed and then discarded. But this modus operandi, no matter how obvious and natural, rests on an assumption-precisely the things we philosophers are trained to root out and question. It assumes that answers are preferable to questions, that the natural life cycle of a question is to seek its telos and fulfi llment in coming to rest, or even dissolving itself in an answer. Th is view is not innocent or isolated but fi nds its place in a larger sense of cosmos, humanity, and their relationship, one that buys into what Leibniz called a preestablished harmony between mind and world, albeit without Leibniz's own Rube Goldbergesque mechanisms for its operation. At bottom, philosophy has generally seen reality as intelligible, as that which is intelligible, which underwrites the project of understanding it. Just think of the way Plato's divided line analogy from the Republic correlates degrees of realness with degrees of comprehensibility, or Descartes's determination that the quantifi able aspects of the world-those which can be captured in formulae and the webs of Cartesian grids-are the only ones we can be sure are out there the way we perceive them, or Hegel's neat summation that the real is the rational and the rational is the real. Th e world is at its most real where our understanding penetrates it most fully, where its ways of being fi t our ways of thinking best, such that the two gear into each other seamlessly. We know we have struck the hard rock of reality when we can know it, when it makes sense to us. Questions naturally lead into answers, then, because the world, in some sense, is made to make sense, is meant to have meaning. Whether that is simply how reality is, or God is communicating with us through the language of existence, or we ourselves have, as enlightened autonomous agents, made the world over in our minds' image-however it is accounted for, we have traditionally called real what confi rms our expectations, what responds to our call, what slips tamely into our taxonomies. Th is underlying epistemometaphysical principle is what I call the Parmenedean Th inkability Principle, as Parmenides implanted this concept in philosophy in embryo at conception, an idea that has guided it ever since: that being and thinking are one. Th at which is is that which is thinkable, and that which is thinkable, is. In one way, it is a tremendously hubristic assumption. Why should we presume world and mind to be compatible? In another, it seems unavoidable. If there isn't at least some compatibility between the two, then all