Quick note before I forget.

I have toyed with abandoning the word “philosophy” to name my idea craft activities. But an old memory has returned to me and restored my belligerence.

I do philosophy. It’s others who claim the term that I’m not so sure about.

The memory: Back in the 90s, Susan did midwifery activism. One battle she helped fight was resisting the effort of licensed nurse midwives — who practiced modern obstetric nursing in hospitals and birthing centers — to prohibit lay midwives from using the term “midwife”. This infuriated me. Midwives had always, until very recently, all been lay midwives. Why should the lay midwives have the name of their profession stolen from them by technical upstarts? I suggested that if nurse midwives wanted to differentiate themselves from midwives, it was they who should find a new name, and I generously offered the title “obsteress”.