Perhaps it is useful to think of philosophical works as a record of the protracted reasoning process it took to arrive at those ideas. These ideas, which now s

Perhaps it is useful to think of philosophical works as a record of the protracted reasoning process it took to arrive at those ideas. These ideas, which now seem trivial and “explainable in less than a minute” are sometimes the result of distilling out, simplifying, and neatly packaging the ideas contained within an entire life’s work (or in some cases multiple generations of work!) It is not clear to me that you could have arrived at some of these ideas without having traversed some of the intermediate steps these philosophers did. It’s only with the benefit of hindsight and the fact that these distilled, bite-sized ideas, have deeply permeated the culture in which we live, that they seem simple.