Why Philosophical Problems are Important

Philosophical problems are genuine intellectual knots that show us our intellectual exigency.  They humble us, whence their importance.  They rub our noses in the infirmity of reason.  The central problems are genuine and important but humanly insoluble. That is what two millenia of philosophical experience, East and West, teaches.  Their genuineness is wrongly denied by the Ordinary Language crowd; their spiritual importance by most analytic puzzle-solvers; their absolute insolubility by the optimistic pure theory types.