Gerald Bivens

...that philosophy provides the means of speaking plausibly about all things and of making oneself admired by the less learned; ...¹

Concerning philosophy I shall say only that, seeing that it has been cultivated for many centuries by the most excellent minds that have ever lived and that, nevertheless, there still is nothing in it about which there is not some dispute, and consequently nothing that is not doubtful, I was not at all so presumptuous as to hope to fare any better there than the others; and that, considering how many opinions there can be about the very same matter that are held by learned people without there ever being the possibility of more than one opinion being true, I deemed everything that was merely probable to be well nigh false.²

Philosophy is not something which originally and by nature is present in our spirit without its cooperation. It is thoroughly a work of freedom. It is to each only that which he himself has made it; and thus even the idea of philosophy is only the result of philosophy itself, which as an infinite science is at the same time the science of itself.³

Philosophy is therefore the art that presents an image of universal existence in concepts.⁴

I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat—a boat which, to revert to Neurath's figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy. All scientific findings, all scientific conjectures that are at present plausible, are therefore in my view as welcome for use in philosophy as elsewhere.⁵

I would regard this fact—that philosophy is one of its own normal topics—as in turn defining for the subject, for what I wish philosophy to do. But someone who thinks philosophy is a form of science may not accept that definition, because his picture is of a difference between, say, speaking about physics and doing physics. And this may be not only a special view of philosophy, it may be a partial view of science; because certain ways in which certain persons talk about a science are a part of the teaching of the science, and the ways in which the science is taught and learned may be taken as essential to an understanding of what that science is.⁶

I understand it as a willingness to think not about something other than what ordinary human beings think about, but rather to learn to think undistractedly about things that ordinary human beings cannot help thinking about, or anyway cannot help having occur to them, sometimes in fantasy, sometimes as a flash across a landscape; such things, for example, as whether we can know the world as it is in itself, or whether others really know the nature of one's own experiences, or whether good and bad are relative, or whether we might not now be dreaming that we are awake, or whether modern tyrannies and weapons and spaces and speeds and art are continuous with the past of the human race or discontinuous, and hence whether the learning of the human race is not irrelevant to the problems it has brought before itself. Such thoughts are instances of that characteristic human willingness to allow questions for itself which it cannot answer with satisfaction. Cynics about philosophy, and perhaps about humanity, will find that questions without answers are empty; dogmatists will claim to have arrived at answers; philosophers after my heart will rather wish to convey the thought that while there may be no satisfying answers to such questions in certain forms, there are, so to speak, directions to answers, ways to think, that are worth the time of your life to discover.⁷

Therefore I do not consider the terrain of philosophy to be either a professional arena in which playfully to solve technical problems of little human consequence or a privileged platform from which to oversee the claims of other disciplines. Rather, I understand philosophy to be a social activity of intellectual pursuit always already infused with cultural concerns and political choices often unbeknown to its participants.⁸

That something [philosophy] is a practice, like law or religion. Very often it is a practice involved with acquiring knowledge—like physics, psychology, history, and the like. But it may also be a practical activity, such as ethics. Philosophy begins when the people involved in the relevant practices become self-conscious—when they begin to wonder about just what it is that they are doing or just what they are really talking about.⁹