As far as its functions are
concerned-mediating activity, humanity's self-consciousness,
corpus of interpretive discourse about humanity and nature-they
remain to be defined in the pragmatic context. It is needless to
reiterate that within each scale of humankind, philosophy
pursued different interests as these proved pertinent to
efficiency expectations. Philosophers never contributed bread to
the table nor artifacts. Their skill was to formulate questions,
especially the very probing questions-"What is what?" and
"Why?"-in their attempt to address the origins of things.
Deciphering the reason of things and actions-in other words,
understanding the world and its apparent order (what the Greeks
called eunomia)-made them simultaneously philosophers and
interpreters of science. "How can we know?" and "How can we
explain?" are subsequent questions, pursued more stringently by
people in search of scientific rationality than by philosophers
per se.
No historic account, no matter how detailed, can do justice to
the definition of philosophy. Its subject changes as human
beings change in the process of their practical
self-constitution. From philosophy, science and all the
humanities (ethics, aesthetics, politics, sociology, law)
evolved. Even our concern with language is of a philosophic
nature. It seems that philosophy is, in the final analysis, the
only authentic domain of abstraction.
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