On my first day as an undergraduate at the university of konstanz, i attended a lecture i had been particularly looking forward to: an introduction to philosophy. The professor, Jürgen Mittelstraß, began by declaring that he hoped very few of us would become professional philosophers—ideally, none. Philosophy was a kind of training that should be carried into other endeavors, not pursued as an end in itself. I got really mad. After the lecture I marched into his office and declared that I was going to be the exception. He smiled and kindly took me under his wing for the rest of my studies. But somehow, after majoring in analytic philosophy in college, I began to gravitate toward literature and theater, probably because I had been doing a lot of extracurricular theater along the way. When, twenty years later, I wrote to tell him what had become of me, he revealed that he had once contemplated a career in theater himself.