It is often said that a disproportionate obsession with purely academic or abstract matters indicates a retreat from the problems of life.

However, most of the people engaged in such matters say that this attitude is based on three things - ignorance, stupidity and nothing else.

Philosophers for example argue that they are very much concerned with the problems posed by 'real life': like for instance 'What do we mean by real?' and 'How can we reach an empirical definition of life?' and so on.

One definition of life, albeit not a particularly useful one, might run something like this: 'Life is that property which a being will lose as a result of falling out of a cold and mysterious cave thirteen miles above ground level'.

This is not a useful definition a) because it could equally well refer to the subject's glasses if he happens to be wearing them, and b) because it fails to take into account the possibility that the subject might happen to fall on to the back of ...say...an extremely large passing bird. The first of these flaws is due to sloppy thinking, but the second is understandable because the mere idea is quite clearly utterly ludicrous.