"Philosopher? You couldn't make a honest living?"

Abstract

I think that from the viewpoint of the future of philosophy, it is important to elucidate both which questionscan be reasonably addressed by philosophy and howthey can be addressed: otherwise, philosophy may well degenerate either into amateur wrestling withproblems which are reasonably solvable only by the effort of professional scientists, or, on the other hand, into professional wrestling with problems that are so ‘truly philosophical’ that they loose any significance once they leave the ivory tower of philosophy. And I think that where such an elucidation is truly crucial is the field of academic philosophy. The view I defend in this article is that philosophy should be continuous with other human ways of coping with the world, especially with the sciences, both natural and social – hence that it is not an enterprise that would underlie science or that would be a prolegomenon to other forms of human intercourse with the world. I think that philosophers should keep in mind that knowledge is always, by its nature, a knowledge that something is the case. And then he faces the dilemma that either the  knowledge he strives for concerns something that is the case in the empirical world (and then he comes to compete with empirical scientists, who are much better equipped for this enterprise), or it concerns something that is the case somewhere else in some other kind of world (and then he must clarify what grants him the power to penetrate into such a nether world). I am convinced that the notion of philosophy as addressing a Platonist world above the real one,or dealing with the depths of human soul, do not lead to a reasonable notion of philosophy. I think that philosophy almost always deals with the real, empirical world; however it does so in a holistic division of labor with science, within which it usually handles the most abstract, conceptual questions.