Abstract

This paper is concerned with some of the differences between philosophy and contemporary science, and with the significance of these differences for the question of the nature of philosophy. Differences of particular interest here are ones that tend to be concealed and ignored through the influence of the professionalist attitudes of contemporary science, an influence that manifests itself in the prevailing normative attitude to the vocabularies and linguistic practices of professional philosophy. It is argued that this normative attitude is questionable in the light of a feature that we take to be essential to philosophy: always being open to the question of its own nature and task.