ABSTRACT
Philosophy is a practice and as such it is situated and dependent on a host of cultural and individual factors. What philosophy is in the business of doing is to produce ideas and new conceptual frames of understanding the world and our lives in it. These ideas are quite socially consequential, and they are therefore always in some sense political as they shape our cultural outlooks and guide our actions. However, the philosophers of the “ivory tower” have typically refused to see how their own practical location affected their ideas and what consequences they have. I argue that the often told “genesis myth” of Western philosophy has been used to create an illusion of neutrality and to enforce exclusive borders of philosophy that has muted ideas of situated, plural, imperfect – and responsible – knowledge.
