Byline: Patrick Kurp Staff writer
Josiah Gould was on his way to the airport from an academic conference in Rochester when the driver asked what he did for living.
Gould, a student of Plato and Aristotle, who is writing a book on the latter's concept of modal logic, explained that he was a philosopher.
The driver, with the facility of a Mets fan assessing Darryl Strawberry's chances in the 1990 season, replied, "Oh, I'm an Episcopalian."
Another time, when the same question arose and Gould gave the same answer, the driver asked, "So, what's a philosopher do?"
"Well, philosphy teaches you to argue," Gould explained.
"I do that pretty good already," said the philosophical limo driver, "but my wife does it better."
Such are the trials of a philosopher, whose profession - though perhaps mankind's second oldest - remains shrouded in obscurity and myth.
"The stereotype is definitely there, that philosophers are absent-minded professors, lost in abstraction," said Gould, professor of philosophy at the State University at Albany.
"They sort of giggle when they hear I'm a philosopher. They figure we wear ratty tweed coats and bump into walls. Or else we sit in a room and think Great Thoughts," …
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