why I love reading philosophy

Today I've picked up Edmund Husserl's Experience and Judgment for the first time in many years. It's crazy as hell.

The book has two main topics: why and how is it that we have not only experience, but also judgments about experience -- i.e., something that we could call truth-claims; and why and how it is that our judgments come from something or are about something. Husserl is not for everyone, not even for every academically trained philosopher, but when he's at his best, he deals with stuff like this in a thrillingly without-a-net fashion.

I know, it doesn't sound that exciting, especially when Husserl writes things like:

What is thus apprehended has, accordingly, its own empty horizon of familiar unfamiliarity, which is to be described as the universal horizon "object," with particular indications or, rather, prescriptions -- namely, prescriptions of a style of expectations to be realized, with explicates corresponding to them.

Trust me, though, this is incredibly sexy. By implication, people who read this and are excited by it are also incredibly sexy.