Why should I tell, or retell, these stories ?

Not just to give you pleasure, but to give you food for thought. These things go together.

Philosophy does begin in everyday life.

Neither the taxi driver, nor the peasant farmer, nor the fetcher and carrier, needed to have read Aristotle or Kant or the Vedic hymns or the Buddhist writings or Confucius, needed to know classical Greek or or ancient Chinese, needed to have studied meteorology or natural history or theology or philosophy.  So however valuable it is to be cultivated in the intellectual and other traditions which have arisen in human societies (and certainly it is valuable), we must not forget that all this is worth little without the ordinary human ability (not always realized) to see, reflect, judge and utter, which can be found in a beautiful and uncluttered form in the question of the Hong Kong taxi driver, the greeting of the Sicilian peasant farmer, and the challenge of the Sudanese fetcher and carrier.  They show what it is in human beings which gives rise to philosophy.

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