To Dare Think

The courage of independent thought of Thales of Miletus, circa 600 B.C., breaking from the dogma of Greek antiquity, is the indispensable moral value which Immanuel Kant then enshrines in renewal of the ancients’ phrase “Dare To Think” in 1784 as the motto of the era of inquiry. It is this posit of the value of courage in the individual’s primary rationality that is arguably pre-eminent among all moral values; the point of departure, “bootloader,” of human thought, borrowing digital parlance. It is this value which gravitated me to Fordham University in 1977 upon its alumnus’ Alan Alda’s endorsement that “Fordham teaches you to think,” nurturing one’s innate capacity to think independently in the courage of one’s own reason, so eminently achieving this expectation so seemingly facile within the walls of its critically thinking Jesuit intelligentsia that it obscured the contrast of its contemptibility outside its sanctuary among a reputedly thinking