Abstract

The question to which I seek here to address myself may be formulated in the following way. Is philosophy to be thought of as essentially one and the same subject in all its different manifestations, carried on, certainly, in noticeably differing ways by different people at different times and in different places, but to be understood nevertheless as consisting of one overall body of knowledge? Or should the term ‘philosophy’ be regarded rather as standing for a ‘family resemblance concept’, and the family in question as containing among its members some who may be hardly capable of establishing any mutually agreed channels of communication with each other? In what follows I shall try to display, if not necessarily to disentangle, some of the underlying complexities on which, as it seems to me, answers to these questions may depend