Home > Positioning > Subjects > Metaphilosophy

Metaphilosophy

Metaphilosophy is the study of the nature of philosophy. The subject starts from the Western notion of philosophy, the love of knowledge and wisdom, and looks for that activity under whatever name each tradition gives it. What knowledge and wisdom are, what they are for and how they are sought is answered within each tradition; none is the measure for another. The subject asks three questions, based on those of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

What is the activity of philosophy?
What is the point of philosophy?
How should one do philosophy?

It also follows the IEP’s account that much metaphilosophy is implicit: “Any philosophical view or orientation commits its holder to a metaphilosophy that accommodates it”; to advance an ontology is to hold that ontology can be done, and to adopt a method is to deem it at least passable. A conception of the nature and point of philosophy, “albeit perhaps an inchoate one, motivates and shapes much philosophy”, often without being stated.

Traditions

Philosophy in Greece and Rome — philosophia, inquiry into nature, wisdom and leisure, the Greeks’ own sortings, and the lines from the first thinkers to late antiquity and Byzantium.
Philosophy in the Islamic world — falsafa and ḥikma, philosophy and wisdom, the tradition’s maps of the sciences, and the lines from al-Kindī to the modern reply to Renan.
Western philosophy — the words and the maps of knowledge, the line from the medieval schools to the special sciences, how the West read the other traditions, and the claims that philosophy has ended.
Philosophy in India — the desire to know (jijñāsā), root text and commentary, and the schools from the Upaniṣads to modern India.
Philosophy in China — learning (xue) and the Way (dao), China’s own surveys of its schools, and the masters to modern China.
Philosophy in Japan — learning (gaku) and the Ways (michi), Kūkai’s and Tominaga’s sortings of the teachings, and the lines to the present.
Philosophy in Africa — the words for wisdom, written and oral lines from the Egyptian instructions to the debate over ethnophilosophy and after.
Philosophy in Latin America — thought (pensamiento) and philosophy, from the Indigenous knowers to liberation and after.