Philosophers have not had much to say about snow. In a short essay about the cold from 2011, the poet Charles Simic writes, “If only Plato and Socrates had to scrape the ice off their windshields. …” How different might things be if, instead of lazing under a plane tree with Phaedrus at high noon in the Grecian summer, Socrates and the beautiful boy had trudged through knee-deep snow. Would they have talked, as they did, about love, language and memory, about the myth of the Muses who were so moved by humans singing that they turned them into cicadas? I doubt it, but we’ll never know.