The Old Professor's Final Lecture

In the spring of 1998, Dr. Margaret Ellington stood before her last class at the University of Edinburgh. For forty-one years she had taught philosophy — Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, the postmodernists. She had published nine books, debated at Oxford, and could dismantle any argument with surgical precision. Her students expected a grand summation. Instead, she set her notes aside, removed her glasses, and said something no one in that lecture hall forgot: "I have spent my life chasing every idea the human mind has produced.…