ABSTRACT
I have been asked to deal with some particular problem, and I should wish to do so in such a way as to throw into relief my view of the nature and functions of philosophical activity at the present time. I use this last phrase in preference to either ‘philosophy’ or ‘philosophical thinking’ for various reasons. I want to avoid any suggestion, which the word ‘philosophy’ might convey, that there is a specific subject comparable in many ways with mathematics or physics or economics, with its own problems and methods, reaching conclusions which can be taken over and used by workers in other fields or by ordinary people as a help for the ordinary business of living; and still more to avoid the suggestion that something can be said about the nature and functions of philosophy without any time limitation. For this reason I have always preferred to speak of philosophizing rather than of philosophy, indicating an activity which has to be engaged in by each individual for himself rather than a set of doctrines which can be added to and improved on by successive workers. Not that the word ‘philosophizing’ negates the notion that philosophers can learn from their predecessors and contemporaries and profit from their mistakes, so that old problems come to be more precisely delineated, assumptions come to be more clearly stated and their implications analysed, blind alleys come to be charted, lines of fruitful exploration indicated. Indeed the word ‘philosophizing’ is useful just because it has no specific implications either way. You learn to do it by seeing what the people called philosophers have been doing and then gradually by doing it you form your own ideas of what it is that is to be done; and whether you decide in the end that all philosophers have been engaging in just the same kind of activity through the ages or that the activity has changed through time your decision is an integral part of your own philosophizing.
