A pHILOSOPHY OF PHILOSOPHY

A pHILOSOPHY OF PHILOSOPHY
EXPLICATED IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD.

ROSS CAMPBELL BARHAM, 57399

PHILOSOPHY HONOURS THESIS (M.Y.E.), 161-504
The University of Melbourne (Parkville).
06.2002

CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION (pp. 2 – 4)
2. pHILOSOPHY AS A-TAKE-ON-THINGS (pp. 4 – 6 )
3. THE PHENOMENAL EXPERIENCE (pp. 6 – 11)
4. A-TAKE-ON THE PHENOMENAL EXPERIENCE (pp. 11 – 15)
5 PHILOSOPHY IN ITSELF (pp. 14 – )
6. PHILOSOPHY AS AN ARTISTIC SCIENCE (pp. )
7. PHILOSOPHY IN THE WORLD (pp. )
8. CONCLUSION (pp. )

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Gearoid Brinn, Graham Priest, Joy and Grant Barham, Fiona Costelloe, Olive and Kate Brinn, and Georgina Butterfield for their support.
INTRODUCTION
Finding myself approaching the conclusion of my undergraduate studies in Philosophy, I thought it particularly fitting that Metaphilosophy be the area that concerned my thesis. I reasoned that in attempting to answer the question, ‘What exactly is it that you have been doing these past years, and why should you wish to continue en suite?’ I should not only be able to take stock for myself but, moreover, openly provide my peers, mentors and superiors with an insight by which to better gauge my potential worth as an aspiring Philosopher.1 However, it is not for this reason only that I have attempted to answer the question ‘What is Philosophy?’ on my own two legs, so to speak.2 In all of my Philosophical life, I have never as yet encountered a definition of Philosophy that I have found satisfactory. Perhaps this is merely a matter of personal eccentricity – I shall let you be the judge thereof.

In Bertrand Russell’s still popular, The Problems of Philosophy, Russell addresses what he calls ‘The Value of Philosophy.’ Therein he writes:
If the study of philosophy has any value at all for others than students of philosophy, it must be only indirectly, through the effects upon the lives of those who study it.3

This opinion, I have noticed, is common amongst non-Philosophers. Perhaps, as this passage of Russell’s writing was primarily intended as an introduction to Philosophy, he was merely appealing to their present sensibilities – ones that, by my lights, would hopefully change as they themselves began to engage in Philosophical enquiry. For as Friedrich Nietzsche noted:
It is difficult to learn what a [P]hilosopher is, because it cannot be taught: one must “know” it by experience – or one should have the pride not to know it.4

And yet, as an individual who hopefully stands at the outset of a meaningful career in the field, I cannot abide Russell’s explicit view that, unlike the ‘practical people’ who defiantly “remain like a garrison in a beleaguered fortress, knowing that the enemy prevents escape and that ultimate surrender is inevitable”,5 the Philosopher, being aware of this, instead seeks solace in highfalutin contemplation – like day-dreaming in order to escape reality – and in doing so may encourage others about them to take some ‘time off’, say, on their weekends to glance beyond the small world of their personal interests into “the midst of a great and powerful world which must, sooner or later, lay our private world to ruins.”6
Although the implication here that the study of Philosophy bestows its participants with a “citizenship of the universe”7 is a rather poetic notion and one I believe can at least in part be claimed for the honour of philosophy,8 as an overall assessment of the value of philosophy, it seems to insinuate that, while the ‘practical’ people are out actually fighting the bloody battles of life, the philosopher is merely playing with words, ideas and so forth, and in doing so implicitly makes light of all things that are inessential to a full and meaningful existence. “It is better to fight against the difficulties arising in language and likewise human understanding than it is to do battle with one’s fellow man” might perhaps be Russell’s motto here, and right he would be in saying so. However, the problems of the world amount to a great deal more than merely the benighted actions of Humanity, and if philosophy is to be understood to bear any truly meaningful significance as a pursuit we need to demonstrate that these other worldly problems are problems of philosophy also.
This then is one of the more central intentions of this paper.
Of course it would be impossible to actually both enumerate all of the world’s particular problems and how they relate to philosophical interests … and by no means do I intend to challenge this common sense here. Rather, it is the intention of this thesis to provide a more general conceptual framework that shall illustrate how we may understand the intrinsic relationship between matters of philosophical thought and those of the real or ‘practical’ world.

With these considerations in mind, I will now offer an introductory abstract of the main thesis expounded herein.

Philosophy as a formal enterprise stands in direct relation to everyday natural philosophies.9 It is through this intimate relationship that Philosophy provides a means to both properly understand the philosophies of others and, more significantly, purposefully and conscientiously articulate, elucidate and, if need be, reformulate one’s own philosophy. As this former potential is occasioned primarily by the characteristic products of the latter, we shall concentrate primarily on the nature of how the latter effects are to be understood.
Philosophy is inherently concerned with, what I shall call, umbrella concepts. Such concepts have traditionally been found in the form of ‘Being’, ‘Existence’, ‘God’, ‘The Good’, ‘Truth’, ‘Morality’, etc. It is umbrella concepts such as these that form the reference points by which the entire conceptual cosmos of one’s experiences of life is understood. They perform this function by virtue of their general or umbrellic conceptual relations to particular everyday concepts. For instance, consider a very limited description of a particular ‘object’: it is small, spherical and smooth. But even such a limited description implies recourse to a plethora of other concepts such as sight, touch, size, shape, texture, extension, space, light, relation, etc., etc. Although such umbrella concepts are obviously themselves umbrellaed by those of traditional Philosophy, they do umbrella the object in question in so far as they equally share relations to many other objects as well. In fact, given the concepts of sight and touch here, we can see that they umbrella all three of the concepts we used to describe the ball.
One may have already drawn a comparison with the Kantian conception of the metaphysical enterprise here and so feel that I, in echoing Kant, have as yet said nothing much at all.10 Although I openly acknowledge that there are many parallels between the two, I am nevertheless confident that my thesis of the nature of Philosophy is distinctly significant. To fully appreciate how this is so, the last third of this paper will be devoted to elucidating how the paradigmatically-bound functions of Philosophy (sketched above) can be seen to bear upon the practical world. The essence of this relies heavily on the supposition that any meaningful notion of existence necessarily involves authentic modes of Being-with-Others. The approach, if not actualisation, of this authenticity, I shall argue, is the primary goal or purpose of Philosophy.

pHILOSOPHY AS A-TAKE-ON-THINGS
In [P]hilosophy the question, ‘What do we actually use this word or proposition for?’ repeatedly leads to valuable insights.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. 6.2111

When [P]hilosophers use a word … and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home? -
What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. #116

Although many have felt that the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein negates the thinking of his past, as the above quotes reveal, there remains at least a family resemblance between the two periods. Perhaps the following passage of Friedrich Nietzsche can better shed some light on how this can be so:
The Error of Philosophers. The [P]hilosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the building: posterity discovers it in the bricks with which he built and which are then often used again for better building: in the fact, that is to say that the building can be destroyed and nonetheless possess value as material.11

And it is in a similar vein that we shall employ Wittgenstein’s ‘brick of wisdom’ to help us construct the architecture of this particular thesis.

The point that Wittgenstein makes in both of the above quotes is that too often Philosophers become so overly engrossed in a particular concept that they tend to neglect many of the other various connections that the concept is commonly thought to bear. In the words of William James, of whom Wittgenstein was a great admirer:
The theorizing mind always tend to the oversimplification of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and onesided dogmatism by which both [P]hilosophy and religion have been infested.12

In order to best avoid similar charges, let us begin our investigation by examining how the word ‘philosophy’ functions in its everyday vernacular sense.

To quote Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”13 Although this is but one example of the vernacular use of the word ‘philosophy’, it is easy to imagine many others: ‘That’s quite a grim philosophy you seem to have there’; ‘I guess the real reason we broke up was that our philosophies were just incompatible’; ‘The ironic philosophy of Catch-22’s protagonist, Yossarian, was to live forever or die trying.’
But how then are we to define this sense of philosophy which has been neglected by all of the dictionaries that I have as yet encountered? Well, we need not give any concise definition like that of a dictionary. Rather, I should like to start by suggesting that this sense of the word is practically interchangeable with ‘a-way-of-looking-at-things-in-a-context-broader-than-the-things-themselves.’ This again could be put more simply as ‘a-take-on-things’ where the use of ‘take’ implies a framing broader than the things themselves.

“O day and night, but this is wondrous strange,” exclaims Horatio.
“And therefore,” Hamlet replies. “As a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”
Surely here Hamlet is voicing the realisation that both his and his friend’s take-on-things to date has not been broad enough to accommodate the apparition of Hamlet’s deceased father which they had just met.
But in order to properly understand both how this can be so and what exactly it entails for our understanding of both philosophies and Philosophy, we need to take a step back and consider the intrinsically phenomenal nature human existence.

THE PHENOMENAL EXPERIENCE
It is an uncontentious Philosophical view that the nature of human experience is constitutionally phenomenal.14 There are many good arguments that successfully demonstrate that our experience of the objective external world, for the most part, accords with the world as it is in itself. Yet, as each of us are essentially subjects it nevertheless must be conceded that our experience remains necessarily phenomenal. That is to say that one’s experience of the world is always one’s experience and not the world itself: our experiential access to the presumed objects of the external objective world is always restricted and never fully open to us. Of course, it has been an ongoing endeavour of humankind to alleviate the constraints that our inherent subjectivity places on our understanding and a great many successes have been accomplished;15 the body of knowledge that the natural sciences have produced is commonly taken to be the epitome of this. However, there has never been, to my mind, any argument put forward that has in any way thrown off the shackles of our subjectivity. Even the great Philosophers, Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl, were only able to make such powerful claims of transcendentalism by virtue of the fact that they both firstly emphasised the subjective human condition to such a strong degree.
It is in this light that I now assert that the phenomenal world in which we live is built up of concepts; from the essay one reads; the room in which it is read; the other objects the room contains; the mood one is in; the time of day; et cetra. Admittedly, it may initially seem like a strange claim to say that one can somehow read or sit-in a concept, but this is surely what we do throughout our everyday lives. Of course, one rightfully presumes that what we are reading or sitting on are in fact external objective objects that exist in themselves, outside of our capacity for conceptualisation. However, although this is most surely the case, we must nonetheless concede that our experience of such ‘objects’ necessarily remains phenomenal. Indeed, the notion of ‘object’ itself is still only a conceptual notion, but by no means do I wish to contend that such concepts exist only in themselves and have no relationship with the external objective world as it is in itself. And yet, for the sake of the present argument we shall look no further than the phenomenal, for I believe and shall argue that this is realm of Philosophy proper. Nor do I wish to raise any serious questions of ontology or epistemology here. Admittedly, throughout this section I shall emphasise the relativity of phenomenal experiences, however, I shall be doing so only in regards to abstract or what I call umbrella conceptualisation and not in terms of any direct link to the external objective world.
Allow me to now demonstrate the umbrellic restrictions that I have promised.

Consider one’s conceptual experience of, say, a room. It is commonly held that such concepts are formed by our ability to recognise patterns in the sense-datum we receive. Although it may well be theoretically possible to argue that no two sense-datum are alike, nevertheless, it is obvious that our minds, in recognising patterns therein, form concepts both general and particular by which, even in the most remotely foreign places, one is still able to identify. Therefore, when I enter this room, if it is a room that I have been in before, then even if it has been surreptitiously transported to a new location, I should be quite able to recognise it as the same. But, although one has the ability to conceptualise objects as objects in one’s own experience, it is certain that conceptual discrepancies often arise between individuals.
Excepting cases where one’s descriptive capacities are obviously limited, it is principally owing to such discrepancies that phrases such as “It was nothing like you described!” are uttered so often. If, for instance, the person standing in the room was accustomed to large, luxurious quarters, they might be inclined to feel that the room was small. Obviously, if they were differently accustomed their conceptual experience would likewise be altered. Of course, given the case of two people with conflicting perceptions, they could reach some agreement by, say, measuring the room. But all such approaches require recourse to other equally questionable objects:16 the object-room can only be objectively measured by other objects. Likewise, time can only be objectively measured by the movement of objects. If we think to the common understanding that mathematical ‘proofs’ can only arise within the context of the mathematical axioms that they are given with respect, we can espy an analogous affinity here and so, at least tentatively, assert that objective truths are only to be found in the realm of objects and conversely, subjective truths must be given in subjective rationalisation. But what we all tend to neglect in the understanding we have of our everyday lives, is the degree that subjective conceptualisation features therein. Take for instance our experiential conceptualisation of seeming objects such as a room, a book, a human, or a candle. Although we are reasonably confident that we can, to degrees, conceptualise the objects in themselves, the element of conceptualisation that endows such objects with meanings such as big, entertaining, runs, and bright, respectively, are all necessarily phenomenal. This, then, is the conceptual area that we are presently concerned with.

One’s experience of concepts is most commonly communicated via the spoken word (which remains to this day the most sophisticated means available), however, many can just as easily be communicated by various other means such as the written word, pictures, music, or even by body-language as artless as simply pointing. This is a significant detail for two reasons, though only one of which concerns our discussion presently17:- many tend to balk at the idea that one’s experience is necessarily conceptualised owing to the fact that all too often one cannot find the words to convey the vibrance of their experiences. Those who may take this line of objection appear to feel that there is an inexorable relation between concepts and words. This notion, however, has no bearing upon what I wish to presently convey as concepts. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote: “If a dictionary can catch up with an author, he is no good.”18 Surely by this he does not mean that authors are to pepper their works with the most contemporary dialects.19 Rather, I suspect that his meaning rests upon the supposition that the worth of an artist resides in their ability to communicate the more subtle aspects of conceptual experience that have hitherto gone unexpressed.
It is indeed in this sense that one should here understand this notion of experience: not as limited by one’s vocabulary and diction, but as inexorably bound in conceptualisation. Take, for instance, one teaching a child to identify and distinguish farm animals. “Cow,” you would typically say while pointing to a picture of a cow and so on for all of the other farm animals that you can think of. Without such instruction, if the child were to encounter a cow or a horse they might well think them both to be some strange breed of dog, say. It is also illuminating to note here that the very same limitations likewise constrain the teacher. As I said, you would think of all the farm animals that you could to teach the child. But what if you had never seen or heard of a ferret before you yourself encountered one? Although your maturely developed conceptual abilities would soon determine by its appearance and situation its character, say, as a warm-blooded mammalian pet intended for purposes other than eating, I know from experience that, for a moment at least, one might think it to be some sort of mutant rat!
The point here is that our use language serves a two-fold purpose as both a means of communication and, more significantly to our present discussion, as an instrument for the development of more distinct and precise modes of conceptualisation.
This notion can be further appreciated if one attempts the almost impossible task of thinking back to one’s own formative years so as to realise that for the most part the world was an unconceptualised blur. But when one observes an infant child, it is all too apparent that this is most certainly how it was. A young child, for instance, treats a chair in much the same way it does any other object – the ground included. Indeed, even the belief that an infant can at least visually recognise its own mother is now commonly understood to be for the most part unfounded; all that a baby recognises is the oval shape of the head and the two points formed by the eyes.20 But, by no means am I intending to say that without a developed capacity for rational conceptualisation the child has no perception of their surrounding environment whatsoever – we do indeed seem to have certain ‘hard-wired’ conceptual capacities such as the instinctual recognition of danger, security, etc. However, it is certain that, although these instincts typically stay with us throughout our lives, in maturity our conceptual capacities are developed to such a relatively high degree of both sophistication and predominance that it is clear that experience as we know it is necessarily conceptualised. In fact, it is precisely because one’s formative years were a relatively unconceptualised blur that it is so difficult to think back to them. What one doesn’t conceptualise can’t be said to be experienced in the same sense that we now understand it as rational beings. I know this to be true from my own mature experiences: often when I am deep in meditation over some Philosophical issue or another, the world about me pales into such a degree of obscurity that when I have finished my mental train of thought, I might find myself physically at the end of the line, as it were, and long past my stop.21 Although other situations do occur when the world similarly pales into obscurity, such as in sleep, transcendental meditation, fainting, etc., these other situations, it seems to me, are brought about by a waning in conceptualisation. Whereas, in the example of Philosophical meditation, one’s conceptual capacities remain in full-swing, it is rather that the concepts that one is concerned with are essentially abstract and so, if given enough concentration, detract from the conceptualisation of one’s immediate surroundings.

A-TAKE-ON THE PHENOMENAL EXPERIENCE
But what relationship does this understanding have with one’s take-on-things? Well, to appreciate this we must persist a little further with our investigation of conceptual experiences.
If one’s experiences are necessarily conceptualised, as I have argued them to be, then, in so far as we feel that our experiences of the world are coherent, so too must our pragmatic conceptual network be coherent.22 As we commonly understand the external world in which we phenomenally live to inexorably be a part of the whole physical universe, each and every concept is likewise to be understood as inexorably intertwined with innumerable others:- the essay with the room; the room with the world; the world with the past and the future; the past and the future as aspects of one’s life; one’s life as good, bad or otherwise; and so on as far as one could care to imagine. Furthermore, the way one conceptualises the world – as it is the world for us – demands that the-way-one-sees-things does not involve some impossibly remote perspective on reality. Rather is necessarily involves a concomitant manner of interacting with it also.23
This view, I believe, is echoed truthfully by the common contemporary convictions we see in the Philosophy of Language. The opinion that words and their corresponding concepts could be thought of as some kind of free-floating independent entities has long ago been abolished.24 Not only has it become apparent that words need to be located in sentences to have sense or meaning, but moreover, those sentences themselves need to be understood within the context of their use.
And so, if we now return to consider the vernacular sense of philosophy as a-way-of-looking-at-things-in-a-context-broader-than-the-things-themselves our definition should appear a great deal more clearly. As our everyday experiences are necessarily conceptualised and each concept is intertwined with others, then it follows that our conscious thoughts are formed within a vast network of concepts. Although everyday experiences form the core of this network (particular people, places, times, activities, etc.) these are all understood in relation to concepts broader than the everyday core concepts. Some of the most common of which are life, friendship, love, temporality, the Good, power, success, God, etc. The particular way that one’s everyday core is related or orientated to these umbrella concepts determines one’s philosophy as way-of-looking-at-things-in-a-context-broader-than-the-things-themselves.
Of course, one’s philosophy need not be explicit. In fact, I tend to believe that for the most part, it isn’t. The majority of people, it seems to me, share by virtue of cultural circumstances similar philosophies to those about them, so that a sense is fostered that their take-on-things is in fact the right and proper one. Any deviations that they may encounter from their own philosophy are merely seen as adverse aberrations. Of course, this is absurd. To admit of a philosophy is implicitly to further acknowledge that one’s take-on-things is exactly that: one’s own take on a world external to oneself as bounded by one’s ability to rationalise and conceptualise, but unfortunately this is something that most people fail to recognise.
Nevertheless, I think that we can safely hold that each and every normal functioning rational human has a philosophy, albeit an implicit one.25 As I said before, the essential nature of conceptual experiences ensures that one’s take-on-things necessarily involves a concomitant manner of interacting with them also. Therefore, in so far as people wilfully affect the world about them and are likewise affected by it, we can be reasonably certain that this is true.
But let us not underestimate the requirement that to possess a philosophy one need be a rational being. As we have established one’s philosophy is simply the way one broadly conceives or rationalises the concepts of our phenomenal reality. Therefore, it is precisely one’s rationality that allows one to see-things-in-context-broader-than-the-thing-itself. This is why the neonate, whose rational capacities are significantly limited, can be said not to have experiences as we know them to be. Reason situates concepts in a systematic framework of relations with other concepts that allows me to know, as it were, that if, say, I get up from my computer and exit my room through the door behind me then I will find myself standing in the hallway. And so it is that the Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘reason’ as the “intellectual power or faculty which is ordinarily employed in adapting thought or action to some end.”26 Although I presume that I am in fact moving through the external objective world, as my experience of this is inescapably ‘seen’ phenomenally through my own eyes, as it were, then it must be conceded that in truth I am instead moving through an intellectual network of concepts. Of course, as I have said, it is reasonable to presume that it is essentially by virtue of the external existence of the external objective world that our experience of sense-data is in anyway felt;- this is not a view that I think can be in any way sensibly denied, for as Martin Heideggar insightfully wrote:
The question of whether there is a world at all and whether its Being can be proved, makes no sense at all if it is raised by Dasein as Being-in-the-world; and who else would raise it?27

Therefore, as our conceptual network belongs for the most part to our conceptual experience of the world, then, in so far as the ‘external’ world appears coherent to us, so too shall our pragmatic conceptual network be coherent. However, although I believe this generally holds true for everyday ‘core’ experiences of the physical world, it is obvious that our everyday experiences involve a great deal more than simply the pragmatic rationalisation of everyday physical objects, as it were. Abstract idealistic concepts, such as possession, love, success, etc. all feature prominently as well. It is these umbrella concepts that form the philosophical outer-limits28 of one’s conceptual framework. To draw an analogy: if one’s conceptual framework is represented by an astronomical spiral galaxy, then the everyday pragmatic conceptual core form the bulging nucleus and the more abstract umbrella concepts form the arms. As the central bulge is typically so densely complicated, it is only by the spiral arms that we can tell ‘up’ from ‘down’, so to speak, and thereby imbue our core experiences with meaning. For instance, the pile of books that are sitting on my desk all fit coherently into my everyday pragmatic experience as physical objects, but more than that, they also bear an abstract significance as objects of culture, education, enlightenment, progress, etc. In fact, there is nothing in my life that I can think of that just is in itself. Even the most aseptic conceptual objects of experience, are still imbued with significance for they remain at least objects of one’s experience for better or for worse. But this should come as no great surprise, for was established before, each and every concept is inexorably related to others.
However, either upon purposefully attempting to explicate or ‘map’ one’s conceptual galaxy, or sometimes even in one’s own otherwise haphazard existence, it becomes apparent that the full rationalisation of the conceptual world that one holds – their take-on-things – bears, both in itself and in contrast to others, many more inconsistencies, grey-areas, and even outright contradictions that one might have first supposed.29 What may have first seemed self-evidently good and proper is all too often discovered in either the natural passage of time or upon purposeful meditation as not so clear-cut. This then is where Philosophy steps in. Indeed, if it weren’t for such philosophical discrepancies, if we all shared the same utopian philosophy, then I find it difficult to imagine that Philosophy would have come into existance at all.

PHILOSOPHY IN ITSELF
Philosophy is to be understood as the attempt to properly delineate and subsequently advance everyday philosophies, overcoming inconsistencies, vagaries and contradictions. It performs this function by focusing heavily upon the umbrella concepts of one’s conceptual framework, for it is by virtue of one’s umbrella concepts that one understands the orientation or significance of one’s everyday pragmatic conceptual core. Of course, one may begin by meditating over an everyday object such as a cup, a table, or a burning candle – as was the case with Descartes. However, if one either is naturally inclined to think ‘deeply’ or is determined to give a fully exhausted account of the object in question, soon enough one will find oneself grappling with umbrella concepts, such as identity, existence, value, temporality, etc. which relate to (or umbrella) not only any one particular object, but to all pragmatic core concepts. As William James said: “[Philosophy is] only thinking about things in the most comprehensive possible way.”30

To employ another analogy by which to further clarify the relational network of the concepts that I am describing here: umbrella concepts demarcate the underlying framework much in the same way that a dot-to-dot picture is born of seemingly random points. And so, in Philosophical meditation, one pours into the umbrella concept as much as one can possibly think of relating to it. With a great deal of luck, the relations that these umbrellaed concepts share with the demarcating umbrella concept (the order by which one ‘joins the dots’) will result in the ‘picture’ that one had hoped to delineate by whatever umbrella concept that was in question. However, as I have said before, for the most part, areas of inconsistencies, contradictions and ambiguities will become apparent. At this point two options arise: the umbrella concept can be deemed adequate and so remain as fixed while one attempts to modify the ‘shape’ of the conceptual substructure in order to overcome these objectionable areas; or one can, with a great deal of ingenuity, attempt to reformulate the umbrella concept itself in order to better accommodate the supposed natural configuration of the umbrellaed conceptual network. This, I believe, is what Nietzsche meant when he wrote:
Legislators of the future.- After having tried in vain for a long time to attach a definite concept to the word “[P]hilosopher” – for I found many contradictory characteristics – I recognized at last that there are two distinct kinds of philosopher:
1. [The Philosophical Workers -] those who want to ascertain a complex fact of evaluations (logical or moral);
2. [The True Philosophers -] those who are legislators of such evaluations.31

To offer a characteristic example of the former method, let us think to the Ethical controversies surrounding abortion. Although the concept of abortion indicates for many a commonly-shared inconsistency in the Philosophy of what is Good, I have yet to encounter an argument which calls on a complete reformulation of the concept of Goodness. Most appear to believe that our understanding of what is Good (the general relations of umbrellaed concepts to the umbrella of Goodness) is adequate enough to decide the matter and merely requires a more concise ‘mapping’ of the relational pathways in the conceptual network. There are certainly many lower-echelon umbrella concepts, such as Freedom, Rights, Being, etc., that will be elucidated, emphasised or, in the more extreme positions, narrowly reformulated by the relevant Philosophical discourses. However, as all such considerations are Ethical in nature, if the highest-echelon umbrella concept of Ethics (which, to invoke the authority of Plato, is Goodness) is itself not questioned then such Philosophising belongs to the Philosophical Worker whose task is the interpretation of pre-established conceptual mores.

The latter method, however, is more difficult to characterise even though it must be said of the majority of the ‘great’ Philosophers that such was their feat. The reason for this lies in the fact that each True Philosopher, in the creation of new umbrella concepts, denies any possibility of commensurability with other philosophies as the entire conceptual network is orientated anew. As Gillies Deleuze and Félix Guattari write:
The fact that Kant “criticizes” Descartes means only that he sets up a plane and constructs a problem the could not be occupied or completed by the Cartesian cogito … This is the creation of a new concept.32

Such thinking leads Deleuze and Guattari to go so far as saying: “there is no point in wondering whether Descartes was right or wrong … Cartesian concepts can only be assessed as a function of their problems and their plane.”33 It is little wonder, then, that Philosophy so often stands charged of progressing no further to answering the very same questions that have plagued it since its dawn. The same sense of incommensurability is also found the case of Heideggar’s ‘criticism’ of Descartes in Being and Time. Therein, Heideggar admonishes Descartes’ use of a seemingly ‘fixed’ objectively accessible notion of spatiality in the creation of his cogito. For Heideggar’s Dasein, however, in so far as his philosophy is Phenomenological, then it must seek to emphasise the subjective nature of all experience. And so he writes, for example:
A pathway which is long ‘Objectively’ can be much shorter than one which is ‘Objectively’ shorter still but is perhaps ‘hard going’ and comes before us as interminably long.34

Heideggar is not questioning the validity or applicability of ‘objective’ notions of space. He is merely “criticising” the make-up of Descartes’ cogito to highlight the substance of his own Dasein, which is an utterly distinct concept.
As Nietzsche wrote:
What dawns on [P]hilosophers last of all: they must no longer accept concepts as gifts, nor merely purify and polish them, but first make them, present them and make them convincing.35

And so it is that the presentation of a great Philosopher’s umbrella concept has the appearance of a matter of fact. It can be thought of as a self-affirming foundation. Although the new umbrella concept must admittedly rely on the relations it is argued to share with other concepts in its construction, as it itself is the ultimate point of conceptual convergence, these lower-echelon umbrella concepts are thereby understood according to the new concept which umbrellas them. As Merleau-Ponty wrote in his Phenomenology of Perception:
People can speak to us only in a language which we already understand, each word of a difficult text awakens in us thoughts which were ours beforehand, but these meanings sometimes combine to form new thoughts which recasts them all, and we are transported to the heart of the matter, we find the source. Here there is nothing comparable to the solution of a problem, where we discover an unknown quantity through its relationship with known ones. For the problem can be solved only if it is determinate, that is, if the cross-checking of the data provides the unknown quantity with one or more definite values. In understanding others [philosophically], the problem is always indeterminate because only the solution will bring the data retrospectively to light as convergent, only the central theme of a philosophy, once understood, endows the philosopher’s writings with value of adequate signs. There is, then, a taking up of others’ thought through speech, a reflection in others, an ability to think according to others which enriches our own thoughts.36

To loosely borrow a metaphor from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: one’s pragmatic conceptual core network is an isolated village in which one lives … totally encompassed by the great mountains of umbrella concepts. The true Philosopher is a mountaineer who pioneers orientations of thinking by climbing the surrounding peaks from which an entirely new perspective of the village below is gained. From one outpost, say, the church, one’s home and one’s family may be seen clearly; from another, however, it may be the rate of growth and organisation of the township that is manifest. The Philosophical worker having the mountaineer’s journal at hand, quietly situates themselves somewhere in the village and looks to the conquered peaks and wonders what the view must be like. From the ground it is easy to look back and forwards between peaks, but for the pioneering mountaineer it must be said that their attention is wholly consumed by the mountain on which they stand. The view is so wondrous that they are invariably convinced that they are privy to God’s own view – they have found Truth. As Nietzsche wrote in his advocation of a nihilism which professed to transcend any such fixed views:
In the mountains the shortest route is from peak to peak, but for that you must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks, and those to whom they are spoken should be big and tall of stature.
…
I no longer feel as you do: this cloud which I see under me, this blackness and heaviness at which I laugh – precisely this is your thunder-cloud.
You look up when you desire to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.
…
I have learnt to walk: since then I have run. I have learned to fly: since then I do not have to be pushed in order to move.
Now I am nimble, now I fly, now I see myself under myself, now a god dances within me.37

I believe that Wittgenstein echoed a similar such a notion when he wrote:
You have a new conception and interpret it as seeing a new object. You interpret a grammatical movement made by yourself as a quasi-physical phenomenon which you are observing …
But then there is an objection to my saying that you have [merely] made a ‘grammatical’ movement. What you have primarily discovered is a new way of looking at things. As if you had invented a new way of painting; or, again, a new metre, or a new kind of song.38

The ‘true’ Philosopher creates or reformulates umbrella concepts which, like the dot-to-dot picture, furnishes the otherwise orientated core conceptual network with a new meaning or orientation. It is then the task of the Philosophical ‘worker’ to best elucidate how this new take-on-things can be accordingly understood to handle the lower-echelon everyday issues, such as abortion.
The experience of either adopting or pioneering a new or different conceptual orientation is, as was said by Nietzsche in the introduction, a most difficult thing to teach to someone whose Becoming has been for the most a natural, gradual, and for the most part implicit process – as is the case, I believe, with most people. However, if we consider the general nature of humour,39 when we look to both the previous quote of Wittgenstein and his following rhetorical incitement, then we can at least superficially convey what it is to be affected with a new take-on-things.:
-Let us ask ourselves: why do why feel a grammatical joke to be deep? (And that is what the depth of philosophy is.)40

Indeed, perhaps here there is something to the laymen’s opinion that Philosophy is a bit of a joke … but if it is, then certainly they are not ‘in on it’, so to speak.

PHILOSOPHY AS AN ARTISTIC SCIENCE
It is with these thoughts in mind that I now wish to categorise Philosophy as an artistic science:

There remains to this day, a conception of Philosophy as being the nurse-maid of the general sciences – including Law, Psychology, Linguistics, Computer-science, Anthropology, et cetera.41 Thomas S. Kuhn, for example, contrasts the typically unquestioned paradigms of the sciences with, what he calls pre-science. The pre-sciences are thought to reside in individual schools of Philosophy where they are characterised by ongoing debates and disagreements over the fundamental umbrella concepts to such a degree that “it is impossible to get down to detailed, esoteric work.”42 It is only when the fundamentals are generally accepted that pre-science crystallises into a paradigmatic school of science. As Kuhn himself writes:
Those unwilling or unable to accommodate their work to [a new paradigm of Science] must proceed in isolation or attach themselves to some other group. Historically, they have often simply stayed in the departments of [P]hilosophy from which so many of the special sciences have been spawned.43

In this light, it should be apparent that these paradigms of general science are to be thought of as actualisations of certain philosophical convictions – the canonisation of tools, protocols, methods of investigation and calculation, and fundamental assumptions through which scientific knowledge is in any way possible. To quote Heideggar again:
The [physical] sciences must make use of a particular notion of force, motion, space, and time; but they cannot ask what such things are as long as they remain sciences and avoid trespassing into the realm of [P]hilosophy.44

The same holds true, I believe, for the umbrella concepts which govern the ethical sciences such as Law, History, Politics, etc.
Pure science can therefore be understood as concerning itself with the vertices of thought; Philosophy with the foundations. Religion, on the other hand, implicitly claims that it already knows the truth of the entire structure from the bottom up.
But what then is the difference between the Philosophical Worker and the normal scientist, even it they be a lawyer?
Well, as was suggested before, the Philosophical worker endeavours to coherently elucidate the relationships that the lower-echelon concepts share with whatever umbrella conception is given by the school of Philosophy that they devote themselves to. Again this is remarkably similar to the normal scientific process as it was theorised by Thomas S. Kuhn. Take, for instance, Albert Einstein’s, now scientific, umbrella conception E=mc2.45 Although this equation debute just under a full century ago, it remains the burden of a significant portion of the scientific community to articulate this axiom of the modern scientific paradigm “with the aim of improving the match between it and nature.”46 And it is here we can espy the intrinsic difference between the Philosophical worker and the normal scientist.
The Philosophical worker strives towards the crystallisation of a particular take-on-things as created by one of the true Philosophical revolutions but not with “improving the match between in and nature.” Although they perhaps may not create the utmost umbrella concepts themselves, umbrella concepts remain their domain. As was suggested before in the example of the controversy surrounding abortion, the Philosophical worker concentrates their thinking on the innumerable points of philosophical controversy that plague our existence, in an attempt to overcome them by recourse to the variety of different takes-on-things that the great thinkers have provided us with. They attempt to demonstrate by rational conceptual thinking only, how these points of inconsistency, contradiction, or ambiguity can be vanquished by a particular ‘mapping’ of the relations shared by umbrella concepts. Although, say, in the case of abortion, their thinking may be briefly drawn down towards the pragmatic conceptual core, the substance of their work remains conceptually abstract.
The normal scientist in contrast, assumes a crystallised ‘take-on-things’ and strives to make it work in what is thereby assumed to be the ‘real’ world. In this sense, science can be thought to produce knowledge in so far as the solutions to particular problems cohere to each paradigm as a whole – such as understanding the doppler effect in Astronomy, the guilt of the accused in Law, the defence of Human Rights in Politics, etc.
And so, in this light, Philosophy can by no means be considered a natural science – even for the so called Empiricists. The sciences assume that the external ‘objective’ world -as given by their take-on-things – serves as the foundation of their ‘truths’. Admittedly, the profound significance that each scientific paradigm (the technologies, tools, protocols, equations, etc. that each era of science is built of) plays in accessing this otherwise ‘objective’ world is becoming more commonly appreciated. However, although each paradigmatic scientific revolution can be aptly said to change the world as we know it, nonetheless, “the scientist after a revolution is still looking [towards] the same world.”47
Philosophy, on the other hand, works to determine what in fact the phenomenal world might be. And so it is that Philosophy is to be understood as an artistic science. It is scientific and bears many similarities to the other sciences, in so far as it is a rational endeavour. However, whereas the other sciences feel that the pragmatic conceptual core or ‘real world’ shall serve as their foundation of truth, Philosophy turns the other way and looks towards the umbrella concepts themselves with the belief that they are ultimately responsible for our take-on-things and, subsequently, of phenomenal reality itself. In this sense, Philosophy can be understood as the attempt to rationalise rationality itself. It is a science as it is the attempt to rationalise something. However, as that foundation is not something external to itself, such as nature, psychology, politics, etc. (all of which relies on a certain take-on-things) it must be deemed an artistic science. True Philosophy is in a sense foundationless as it purposely attempts to create foundations. The Philosophical Worker, although working to introduce and establish the foundations of a particular take-on-things into the community at large and so thereby crystallise it, remains without a solid foundation because once a foundation has been crystallised it no longer belongs in the realm of Philosophy proper, though it remains philosophical. This is the ‘artistic’ aspect of the science of Philosophy. It is artistic as, until the point of cultural crystallisation, it remains essentially a matter of expression – which is the realm of art. But in order to appreciate the significance of this, we now need to turn to the third and final point of consideration in my metaphilosophy.

PHILOSOPHY IN THE WORLD
True Philosophy, I have argued, creates the umbrella concepts which orientate our understanding of the everyday pragmatic conceptual-network core which is the world for us as phenomenal beings. Subsequently, the Philosophical worker sets out to crystallise the consequential orientation of these umbrella concepts.
Now, much earlier on in this paper I stressed the point that, although concepts are represented by language, these points of communication are not the concept itself.* The concept itself is as you experience it to be. The corresponding word which one attaches to it is not the concept, but a verbal or written representation of the concept. And so, when I draw the chair that I sit on and write the word ‘chair’ underneath it, neither of these can be said to be the concept of the chair. And, although we correctly assume that the drawing of the chair refers to the non-conceptual ‘objective’ chair on which I sit, it is an indubitable fact that the two are not directly linked. As we established in the section on the vernacular sense of the word philosophy, the drawing of the chair is, in fact, first and foremost a conceptual representation of my conception of what I conceptualise to be the external ‘objective’ chair. The two are linked only via my conception of them.
But, although my conceptualisation of reality is not in itself my communicative expression of it, the inexorable tie between the two (which I argued previously, tends to be overly felt) becomes all too apparent.
Allow me to further elucidate this point by once again quoting Wittgenstein:
Can one imagine a stone’s having consciousness? And if one can do so – why should that not merely prove that such image-mongery is of no interest to us?48

The substance of this quote, it appears to me, is that what cannot be expressed cannot be coherently thought or proven to to exist, as we understand existence phenomenally. For example, although it was only given implicitly before, the clinching aspect of my argument that experience is necessarily conceptualised,49 is that the onus falls upon any objectors to show that we have experiences that aren’t conceptualised – to do so, of course, would be absurd (like proving that there can be no proofs). However, this is not because it is logically absurd that we could have unconceptualised experiences – I, myself, argued earlier that we can locate times where our conceptualisations are often vague and inconsistent – rather, it is the idea that one could conceptually represent unconceptualised experiences that is absurd. If there are unconceptualised experiences, the best that the champions of which could hope to do, is point towards them. But they cannot represent them; to do so would be to render them conceptualised and therefore undermine their own argument.
But, although it is therefore true that that which cannot be expressed cannot coherently be thought or proven to exist, this claim is too extreme in itself to advance our understanding here. Rather, let us lessen the claim slightly to instead say that, that which is not communicated is essentially lost. With Wittgenstein’s conscious stone in mind, it should be obvious that even though one may be confident of the existence of their phenomenal experiences of the world, if they are not communicated to others then, in the extreme case of death, those experiences will in a sense die along with you. In this light, when a person dies a phenomenal world dies with them. Likewise, it can reasonably be stated that when a person lies they, in a sense, murder a part of the world. Consider the example of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel ‘Mother Night’ where the protagonist, who has been utterly abandoned by the American government which encouraged him, as a freelance spy, to become a high-ranking Nazi member, writes: “We are what we pretend to be.”50
The force of the conviction that one exists in a kind of fixed Cartesian sense is so strong that we can easily forget that most every other person probably feels or has felt the same way. A trip to a War Memorial can serve one well as a remedy against such egotistical foolishness, for it is most definitely the case that the world as we know it (the phenomenal world) exists only in the conscious minds of those who conceptualise it. But as has been repeatedly established throughout this paper, the world as we know it is different for each individual. Of course, they are many points of shared agreement which, I suspect, are typically born of cultural influences. However, as each and every one of us are individuals with individual pasts and individual futures, each phenomenal world is also to be understood as individual. Furthermore, as the individualistic discrepancies between two people are increased so too will the differences between their worlds be increased. One need only think to the stark philosophical differences between the religious convictions of the Buddhists and that of the Muslims.
The seeming isolation of these phenomenal points of existence can only be overcome by communication. However, as anyone who has sent a story or a poem out in to the world at large will appreciate, people readily assimilate the philosophies of others into their own. As Goethe put it: “Surely everyone only hears what he understands.”51
If, say, I were to read the diary of a person who lived ‘so many’ Centuries ago in a country and a culture utterly distinct from my own, could this endeavour facilitate my coming to know that person? Well, depending on the degree to which their writings were introspective, I might be able to glean some appreciation of what life and the world was for them. But if reality was for them so distinct from my own, as we could only suppose that it may have been, their philosophy would surely be, for the most part, swallowed up and assimilated into my own so that I should never know otherwise.
Philosophy’s insistence in dealing with umbrella concepts works to combat this. As was just implied, I should be prevented to degrees in unknowingly assimilating the diary of another if the entries were introspective, for introspection necessitates recourse to the abstract, to umbrella concepts. Philosophy, however, not only employs umbrella concepts, but moreover creates and instantiates them. As I have demonstrated, these umbrella concepts determine the orientation of the pragmatic core of one’s conceptual network. Therefore, once a full articulation is conveyed of the orientating relations that a particular umbrella concept bears with its underlying core, every single nitty-gritty component of that core must be seen in light of the concepts that umbrella it. In this manner one is provided with a means of ensuring that the pragmatic conceptual core cannot be easily assimilated unknowingly into another’s take-on-things. As Merleau-Ponty wrote: “a philosopher’s thought is merely a way of making explicit his hold on the world, and what he is.”52
It is easy to imagine, for example, a Solipsist, an Empiricist, and a Rationalist all being perfectly able to sit and have an amiable conversation over a pot of coffee. So long as the conversation remained focused on the everyday pragmatic core concepts of, say, the weather, the price of fish, etc., then the conversation should roll on quite smoothly, with each person readily assimilating the philosophical meanings of the others into their own respective take-on-things. However, if the conversation were to drift towards understanding what each other person meant by the things that they had said in-a-context-broader-than-the-things-themselves, then it’s nature would likewise move from idle chatter to purposeful Philosophical discussion.
This can be understood in a way much like the ever-popular children’s toys, where one has to match the physical ‘male’ shape with its corresponding ‘female’ window. If the male object is much smaller then the female window, then any male part can be put through any female hole in any orientation. However, if the male shape is made big or broad enough then it will only enter the window in a certain orientation. Therefore, the purpose of the above hypothetical discussion between three Philosophers, can be understood as an attempt to form a ‘window’ in each other’s conceptual network so as to comprehend one and other’s explicit take-on-things.

Such thinking leads to two main consequences:
In the spirit of Horace’s monumentum aere perennius,53 one’s take-on-things has the potential to be given an existence outside of the consciousness from which it originated, and therefore also has the potential to be, in a sense, immortalised. As Plato wrote in preference of dialectic:
…in this way they secure immortality for it, and confer upon the who possesses it the highest happiness which it is possible for a human being to enjoy.54

Perhaps this is why he also claimed “that the soul of the philosopher alone should regain its wings.”55
But more importantly, Philosophical progress is possible, as we can be reasonably sure that the philosophy of another – their take-on-things – was actually as it suggested itself to be. Therefore, the plethora of everyday philosophical inconstancies, vagaries, and contradictions which both plague our phenomenal existence and inspire Philosophers to articulate, elucidate, create and reformulate our understandings of umbrellic conceptual relations, can be gradually overcome. As we can be reasonably certain that a right-minded Philosopher is able to adequately determine where and how these philosophical dilemmas arise by virtue of properly understanding a number of different philosophies (each with their own pros and cons), then we can be better equipped not to make similar mistakes again in regard to our own philosophy.

CONCLUSION
All the while, as I have engaged in the Metaphilosophical investigations of which this very thesis is the final product, it has been apparent to me that, while this process was not Philosophy in its entirety, it was nevertheless an example of Philosophy and furthermore was also an attempt to delineate the ‘essential’ nature thereof. Taking this thought to the extreme, once in response to the very same questionary rubric which we find these pages guided by, ‘What is Philosophy?’, I only half-jokingly wrote in my notebook, “This is!” For again, as Wittgenstein wrote:
One might think: if philosophy speaks of the use of the word “philosophy” there must be a second-order philosophy. But it is not so: it is, rather, like the case of orthography which deals with the word “orthography” among others without then being second-order.56

I should like to take this further by asserting that all Philosophical investigations, no matter what their focal points may be, are, by virtue of being Philosophical in nature, implicitly investigations of Philosophy itself. A Philosophical treatise on the nature of God, Science, Language, etc., is by no means to be consequently considered as works of theology, science, and linguistics respectively – although they may later be carried across to have some bearing thereof. In so far as a dissertation finds itself located in a Philosophical context, it is at least implicitly a work of First Philosophy. This, I believe, betrays something essential of the nature of Philosophy.
With both this in mind and the fact that the substance of this paper is Metaphilosophical, we should be able to look back over both what I have argued and how I have argued it, and in determining to what extent they accord with one another we should be thereby able to ascertain the validity of my philosophy of Philosophy.
Let this notion of validilty not be misunderstood; I do not mean that merely in so far as my philosophy is demonstrated to not be self-conradictory, it must then be true. Of course, there are a great deal of Philosophical writings that, although are coherent in themselves, are still taken to be seriously flawed. Rather, to appreciate the sense of philosophical validity that I have intended here, one must keep in mind that the substance of this thesis is Metaphilosophical. In writing this paper, I have strived to best emulate what I understand of the true Philosophical process, even if my reformulation of the concept of Philosophy is not profoundly revolutionary or orginal. However, these words are not intended as a critical discourse; they are not those of the Philosophical Worker. If they were, then their validity would be determined against the umbrella conceptions of whichever Great Philosopher I had set myself under. Although I have invoked the wisdom of many other Philosophers throughout, if we think back to Nietzsche’s The Error of Philosophers, each was employed only as the ‘bricks’ by which the entire architecture was built.
Now, this may all seem somewhat egotistical, but I believe myself to be well perfectly aware of my present station. Indeed, it is my most sincere hope that when I look back over these pages in years to come, I shall consider them to be both naive in their conception and probably full of holes – if my future does not produce these effects then surely I will have failed to develop both philosophically and Philosophically. However, even though there most certainly are many other Philosophers who already possess the wisdom of experience that the future will hopefully offer me, such thinking does nothing to detract from the philosophical validity of my thesis as it stands presently. What I have written here is my philosophy of Philosophy explicated in the Philosophical method. It is my take-on-Philosophy and is valid in so far as it can be demonstrated to be self-consistent, not because self-consistency is in itself enough to determine the validity of a Philosophical thesis, but because this thesis is both Metaphilosophical in susbstance and is, at the same time, an example of my own Philosophy. To demonstrate that it is self-affirming, is to concommitantly demonstrate that it is my philosophy of Philosophy and as I have said all along, Philosophy is essentially the attempt to articulate one’s everyday take-on-things with the view to advance them.

In summary, the main thesis herein claimed that all phenomenal experience is conceptualised into a network whole, where the abstract conceptual concepts form the conceptual umbrella which orientates and imbues meaning into the pragmatic core – i.e. determining one’s philosophy. Philosophy works to articulate and elucidate a take-on-things by emphasising the relations that these umbrella concepts share with the pragmatic whole. However, owing to either the seemingly insurmountable points of philosophical difficulties (grey-areas, inconsistencies, contradictions, etc.) or perhaps just the eccentric genius of a particular thinker, at times throughout the history of Philosophy, there have arisen great Philosophers who have created or reformulated new umbrella concepts which the Philosophical workers subsequently set out to affirm or deny, once again, by the elucidation of the relations that these new umbrella concepts share with the pragmatic whole.
Why it is that anyone should wish to do this is readily appreciable upon thinking back to our opening premise that all experience is conceptualised. As the world as we know it exists first and foremost in our minds, then unless we communicate the differences amongst each other then when we die so too does our world. But there is an added facet to this – the one that Philosophy is praised for: as Philosophy’s use of umbrella concepts works to ensure that a disparate philosophy cannot be readily assimilated into another, we are provided with a means of combating the philosophical inconsistencies, contradictions, and ambiguities which plague our everyday existence.

Looking back over this thesis it should be clear that I have attempted to delineate the uppermost umbrella concept herein, ‘Philosophy’, by recourse to its lower-echelon concepts of ‘experience’, ‘umbrella concepts’, ‘philosophy’, ‘one’s-take-on-things’, ‘conceptual network’, ‘The true Philosopher’, ‘The Philosophical Worker’, ‘existence’, etc. and have throughout offered articulations and elucidations of the relations that these concepts share with what I have argued to be one’s pragmatic conceptual core.
Furthermore, any objections to my thesis, although perhaps quite aptly suggesting a better way of understanding these relations, will nevertheless play straight into my hands, for herein I have created an abstract conceptual network (like a dot-to-dot picture) which should not readily be able to be unknowingly assimilated into another’s take-on-things. If someone believes that I have missed, understated, or denied an important area of the Philosophical enterprise, although their objection may well be correct and I shall be coerced to reconceptualise this particular take-on-things, nevertheless, their ‘criticism’ of my thesis shall serve to demonstrate that what I have said (but not what I have perhaps unwittingly ignored) is at least philosophically true.

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