Somewhat paradoxically, many people consider philosophy both very difficult yet at the same time eminently accessible—something you can parachute into, either from other academic disciplines or from no discipline: from science and drama and history of ideas, or from banking, big business, and bus-driving.

Quite a few professors, in various disciplines, display a craving to be allowed to wear the label “philosopher.” When a teacher of literature, or history, or whatever, parachutes into philosophy or one of its borderlands, the first thing he tries to do is move the boundaries and change the shape of the territory. If you suggest to him that his latest book is not strictly speaking philosophy as traditionally understood, but rather literary criticism (say) as traditionally understood, he will scream with rage and rush around yelling about the wickedness of “artificial academic boundaries.” You never get this reaction if you say that some book should be labeled economics rather than political theory, or mathematics rather than physics. Conversely, anyone parachuting out of philosophy is likely to want to carry some of its prestige into his new territory. For it seems that to describe writers, or theories, or topics as philosophical is to endow them with considerable prestige. I suspect that the reasons are etymological (and therefore superstitious).

Jonathan Lear, the author of Love and Its Place in Nature, looks at first sight to be parachuting out of philosophy into psychoanalytic theory. While it appears from the jacket blurb that Lear