1. Much of my discussion here follows Hacking's, Ian “Five Parables,” in Philosophy in History, ed. Richard Rorty, J. Schneewind, B., and Skinner, Quentin (Cambridge, England; Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 103–125, esp. 110–114 Google Scholar. While, like Hacking, I am deeply suspicious of a problems approach to the study of philosophy, I also agree that the analytic skills gained by mastering this methodology can be valuable not as ends in themselves, but as means to other, more illuminating, intellectual projects to which the problems approach may be irrelevant.