Founded in 1827 as King’s College, and secularized in 1850, the university has grown into Canada’s premier center of higher learning not just by accumulating faculties and funding, but by nurturing inquiry. This is especially true of its Department of Philosophy, whose influence stretches far beyond the walls of its seminar rooms. It is a department known for its clarity, its rigor, its refusal to sacrifice truth on the altar of trend. As one former student put it, “You leave the U of T philosophy program not with answers, but with better questions.”
And running quietly alongside this tradition is a path called Philosopher’s Walk.
I didn’t walk it. Not properly. We didn’t have time. But our Uber traced its edge like a stylus following the groove of a record. Between museums—ROM to the south, Royal Conservatory to the north—I caught flashes of it: a sun-dappled bend here, a stone bridge there, the murmur of trees hiding the buried bed of Taddle Creek. A former stream, now vanished beneath the city, but still guiding the contours of the land.
That struck me as more than geographical. It felt epistemological.
Philosopher’s Walk is less a place than a proposition. It follows an absence—the long-gone creek—but it marks presence: a corridor where generations of thinkers have walked, pondered, and perhaps confronted the oldest of philosophical tensions: the seen and the unseen. “We are what we repeatedly do,” said Aristotle—not a U of T philosopher, but certainly a patron spirit. To walk the same route each day, to turn the same questions over in your mind, is to live a philosophical life.
I thought of Emil Fackenheim, who taught here and survived both Hitler’s regime and the death camps. He warned of the “eclipse of reason” and called on postwar thinkers to reclaim the moral seriousness of philosophy. I thought of Ian Hacking, whose work on the history of scientific classification challenged the very stability of categories we take for granted. “Kinds of people,” he once said, “are not discovered—they are made.” And then remade, again and again, in places like this.
U of T’s philosophy department has long been a proving ground for ideas that do not bend easily to fashion. It does not aim to entertain. It aims to endure. It produces thinkers more interested in sharpening their concepts than their resumes. As one professor famously quipped: “If you want to be clever, go into advertising. If you want to be clear, stay in philosophy.”
The path that winds behind the buildings—worn by footfall and time—feels like a metaphor made literal. Not a triumphal march, but a humble tracing of something older than ourselves. A buried stream. A buried truth. Something that cannot be held, only followed.
I didn’t walk the Philosopher’s Walk that day. But for a moment, I watched it shimmer between museums and roadways and schedules, and I realized I didn’t need to set foot on it to understand what it was.
It is the space between knowing and not knowing. The liminal passage between thought and word.
And perhaps that’s the real gift of the University of Toronto: not to hand you the answers, but to leave you—wisely, frustratingly, generously—midway up the path, wondering where to place your next step.