In the wake of the vanity of the postmodern aesthetic in architecture and the vain quality or failure of the postmodern in theory, philosophers have discovered a new preoccupation with the ethics of the scholar. And by thus elevating ethics to the position of first philosophy, we also recuperate the history of metaphysics for the future and effect a return to the phenomenology of the question — not only to phenomenology as problem solving but also to the technical and information and even the natural sciences. Perhaps in the process, the question of art might likewise be restored to the experts — a reasonable strategy for philosophy in the tired wake of Meyer Schapiro's critical engagement with Martin Heidegger's hermeneutically informed but art-historically faint reading of a pair of shoes in a famous painting by Van Gogh.