Philosophy

The one thing that strikes you about Ikea's new North America Service Center in Conshohocken is how uncorporate it is. Colorful, comfortable and homey - in a birch-veneer Ikea way, of course. Three levels high, 75,000 square feet of light concrete and glass, the building has most of the same design features as the big-box Ikea store next door, and it's furnished with the stuff of the international home-furnishings chain's catalog - except for the bedroom accoutrements. Still, there are showers in the ground-floor restrooms if an employee needs one after a trip.

You might compare the 76ers' training camp to a study-abroad program, headed by Maurice Cheeks, head coach and professor of defense. For each of the four days and the five practice sessions they have had in Spain, the Sixers have listened to Cheeks lecture, teach, and painstakingly go over the defensive principles he would like to see in his team. He said his players have listened, although one wonders whether he might pull a pop quiz on them. "It's a little bit more challenging, more standing around," Cheeks said.

A change in philosophy will guide the Flyers next season, and club chairman Ed Snider already has imparted it to general manager Bob Clarke: No more trading youth and draft picks for veteran players. "We're going back to our roots," Snider said yesterday at the Flyers Skate Zone in the Far Northeast, where he and 200 children from the School District of Philadelphia celebrated the successful first year of the Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation. "We're not going to go and trade picks anymore, or trade our kids ever again for veterans.

The silence in an upstairs room at the Friends Center is so loud on this Saturday every sound seems amplified: the tap of raindrops on a window; a police siren outside; the tick-tock of a grandfather clock. Inside, six members of the Lilac Breeze Sangha meditation group seek internal peace and presence of mind. They sit still. They breathe slowly. They walk in a circle, as if in slow motion. This is the regular alternate-Saturday meeting of a meditation group started by Quakers and since joined by people from other faiths, or from none at all. The Lilac Breeze Sangha, which meets for 2 1/2 hours every other Saturday in Center City, is a meditation group that combines theology, practice and philosophy.

Terry Eastland is the publisher of the Weekly Standard With Samuel Alito's confirmation, it's time to take stock of this particular episode in the making of a justice, the nation's 110th. Bear in mind that Alito was not President Bush's first choice to succeed Sandra Day O'Connor. The estimable John Roberts was, but when Chief Justice William Rehnquist died, Bush decided to redesignate Roberts for the center seat. That meant finding another nominee for O'Connor's seat. Bush surprised the world by naming White House counsel Harriet Miers, whose nomination proved a major blunder.

Chatting in the immaculate Chelsea loft he shares with partner Henry Finder, an editor at the New Yorker, Princeton University philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah is surrounded by the artifacts of a brilliant, privileged, cosmopolitan life. Terra-cotta artworks from Ghana, collected by his English mother. Russian icons inherited from her diplomat father, once Britain's ambassador to Russia. Art objects from other African countries that keep the continent of his Ghanaian father, Joseph Appiah, a London-educated barrister who fought for his nation's independence, vibrantly present.

WE AMERICANS aren't very good at being hard on ourselves. A glance at the cover of popular (mostly women's) magazines would lead you to believe that the average person is wracked with guilt about (1) sub-par job performance, (2) less-than-stellar parenting skills, (3) inadequacy in intimate relationships and (4) poor body image. The casual observer would be forced to conclude that we hardy descendants of immigrant stock are dissatisfied with failure and willing to make sacrifices in the name of an honorable (but ambiguous)

IFELL IN LOVE at a cheap restaurant in Nashville, over eggs and hash browns, with a man named Plato. I was studying when I came across his Allegory of the Cave. I drank it up like the coffee in my mug and eventually swapped my major in English for philosophy. When I announced this, my dad looked at me blankly - probably calculating the cost of this unmarketable degree and suspecting recreational drug use. I felt misunderstood at my Christian college, and soon headed to New York University, where I'd be surrounded with people like me - less rigid in their beliefs and not as preachy.

The facts of the case were stunning: A 10-year-old was strip-searched in her Schuylkill County, Pa., home by police officers whose warrant authorized only the search of her father, a suspected drug dealer. To the other judges who heard the case, the law seemed clearly on the girl's side: The very purpose of a warrant is to limit the scope of permissible searches. But Samuel A. Alito Jr., now a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, saw it differently. And his opinion opens a window onto one facet of his judicial philosophy.

Perhaps the most telling moment of Sandra Day O'Connor's quarter-century career on the Supreme Court came on her last day. In her opinion on the Kentucky Ten Commandments case, O'Connor wrote that, given religious strife raging around the world and America's success in resolving religious differences, why would we "renegotiate the boundaries between church and state. . . . Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?" This is O'Connorism in its purest essence.