Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

9-28-89 Thursday. Yesterday, while talking to Paul Waak in my office, Richard Bett popped into the doorway to chat. Paul is a student in one of Richard’s courses, but he came by to talk to me rather than Richard about his term paper on prejudice. Richard joked that I was “stealing away” his students. “Not at all!”, I said, “Paul came to me.” Paul and I had been talking about the nature of philosophy and Richard must have heard us from across the hall. I made my standard argument that philosophy is the logical analysis of concepts. After several fits and starts, I clarified my position to Richard. What I’m doing, I explained, is trying to come up with a conception of philosophy that (1) is coherent, (2) distinguishes philosophy from related disciplines such as psychology and history, (3) explains why such specialties as philosophy of law and philosophy of science are within philosophy, and (4) provides a criterion for determining when a particular person is doing philosophy. In other words, I’m trying to figure out what it is that makes philosophy what it is and not something else. That, itself, is a philosophical task. Richard, like most so-called philosophers and philosophy students of my acquaintance, is a catholic with respect to the nature of philosophy. These people want to include a wide variety of activities in the category labeled “philosophy”. More specifically, they do not want to deny the title “philosopher” to anyone who wants it. But that’s silly. What people call themselves and how other people think of them is at most evidence of what they are. My goal is to determine whether they are philosophers. I enjoyed the discussion. It gave Richard and me a chance to state and clarify our respective positions on the nature of philosophy.