Philosophy

The big idea: To calmly espouse the Vanguard Group Inc.'s dull-as-dishwater, invest-for-the-long-haul strategy, even when the market was tanking. "It's boring," Sauter acknowledges, and a little scary to follow. "We just keep saying, you know, 'Stay the course.' " During the last year of market turmoil, the company has been saying it in reassuring briefs on its investor Web site - "right on the home page," Sauter said. "If we've had a tough week, typically we try to get something out by the end of the week.

Finally - a decent Protestant Reformation comedy! Here is a nothing-special Martin Luther, teaching and preaching at Wittenberg University (fall semester, 1517), never late for his Bible study group, and furious at the idea that the church is selling Catholics indulgences to absolve them of sins. Here is his iniquitous faculty colleague, Dr. Faustus, spouting philosophy to tender young students and leading them to question The Truth. And here is tender young Hamlet, a promising but impressionable foreign student (Denmark)

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Jonelle Raffino found herself suddenly out of work. So did her husband, mother and father, who, like Raffino, had been consultants in the telecommunications industry. When the stock market plunged, their jobs simply disappeared. Desperate for a way to turn around their bad luck, Raffino and her mother, Jonette Beck, saw a possible solution. "We turned to an old family friend," Raffino says. "Knitting. " Yarn can be created from soy fiber, a byproduct of tofu manufacturing, the pair learned.

They stumble onto this dusty downtown block like accidental pilgrims on a Center City stroll. They are sidewalk daydreamers. Philosophers. Artists. Ravaged souls. They stay for a moment or something slightly more. And they stare in prayerful silence at a three-ton steel ball. It hypnotizes as it lifts, drops, sways and crashes into eight stories of city concrete like a thunderous wave in an ocean storm. There is magic in the shadow of the wrecking ball at 13th and Race Streets.

Michael J. Kerlin of Lafayette Hill, a professor of philosophy at La Salle University for more than 40 years, died Friday of leukemia at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was born 71 years ago. Dr. Kerlin had taught at La Salle since 1966 and served as chairman of the philosophy department for 28 years. In 1986, he received the school's Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. One student nominator referred to him as "perhaps the world's greatest discussion leader.

Michael A. Duzy, 92, of Bryn Mawr, president of Harcum College for 20 years, died last Monday at Lankenau Hospital of complications after hip surgery. Dr. Duzy served as president from 1963 to 1983 when Klein Hall, Pennswood Hall and the academic center were built on the Harcum campus in Bryn Mawr. "Dr. Duzy ably led the college through a period of unprecedented change and growth," Jon Jay DeTemple, Harcum president, said in an interview last week. Born in 1915 in Mahanoy Plane, Schuylkill County, Dr. Duzy graduated from Ridley Park High School in 1931 and entered the order of De La Salle Christian Brothers that same year.

Qrescent Mali Mason, a third-year grad student in philosophy at Temple University, snared a $138 discount fare and made it down to the "Athens of the South," complete with its own full-scale Parthenon. Lina Buffington, who earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at Emory University and now works for the nonprofit Philadelphia Futures, gave a talk on how she applies her work on philosophers Wilhelm Dilthey, Jean-Paul Sartre and John Dewey to help young blacks stay in college. Jameliah Shorter, a sophomore philosophy and religion major at Paine College in Augusta, Ga., asked her mother to drive her eight hours through rough mountain roads to attend.

Anita Allen remembers an extraordinary remark made by one of her white, male University of Michigan philosophy professors in the 1970s when she was in graduate school seeking a Ph.D. in philosophy - a field that at the time lacked a single black woman professor. " 'Anita,' he told me," recalls Allen between the good-natured laughs that punctuate the seriousness of what she says, " 'you will have to pee on the floor of the American Philosophical Association convention to not get a job in philosophy.

Standing on a hill in East Jerusalem, amid the clash of religious and political orthodoxies, stands a musty old museum devoted to human progress. When you walk into the Rockefeller Museum, with its old-fashioned display cases crowded with ancient pottery shards and oil lamps, you can begin by looking at the stone tools of early man. Then you proceed room by room through the invention of agriculture and cities, winding up finally with the statues and reliquaries of the medieval era. What you're really looking at is a philosophy of history.

Though you probably don't know her name, there's a good chance you've heard Asha Puthli's voice, no matter what type of music you're into. For jazz fans, she's the mystery woman who kept pace with Ornette Coleman on two cuts of the free-jazz maestro's 1972 album "Science Fiction. " In European dance circles, she's known for a couple of mid-'70s disco hits - one of which, "Space Talk," introduced Puthli's voice to modern hip-hop fans via Diddy, 50 Cent and Notorious B.I.G. samples.