2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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the ineludible significance of the past history of philosophy for philosophy’s own activity.
Therefore, relative to those assumptions, the connection is valid. This means that it can be
properly rejected only by either (a) refusing to equate philosophy to the search for the truth
of being or by (b) choosing to ignore the relevance of history for the philosophical activity.
I have dwelt at length, in the previous chapter, on Hegel’s argument for the ineludibility of
history—what I called his second-order reflexivity argument for the possibility of philoso-
phy. I take here for granted that Hegel has established on quite firm grounds that philoso-
phy, if it does not want to collapse into a collection of consolatory opinions, must take its
own history into account.
As for the first premise, the following may be said: it is not as easy as it may perhaps
seems at first glance—which does not mean impossible— to both reject it and exhibit a rea-
son for philosophy’s rights to survival. The first alternative that comes to mind consists in
trying to carve out a specific domain for the philosophical pursuit, and more precisely a
well-defined, rigourously bound range of phenomena. There again, however, the problem
is how to delimit such a terrain from the pursuit of any given empirical science. Think, for
example, of language, or of the range of “mental phenomena,” or of the “epistemological,”
etc. In any specific instance, it is easy to think of an “empiric” scientific discipline that can
lay a legitimate claim on those fields as its most properly own. In the examples mentioned,
linguistics and various brands of psychology have in fact been proposed as legitimate re-
placements of the old-fashioned philosophical enterprise. This alternative, in short, al-
though possible, is not very palatable because it is always on the verge of collapsing into
one of three possible outcomes: either the possibility of a philosophical enterprise, i.e. the
quest for truth independent from science, is negated or it is not. In the latter case, the pos-
sibility of philosophy’s autonomy my be defended on the presumption of a more general
method of looking at phenomena. Philosophy would then become either a general method-
ology for science, or a sort of introductory survey of the a field whose proper study is better
left to the scientific discipline when times will be mature. But then, it is easy to see how
precarious is philosophy’s position, since in both cases it appears that either task would be
better be left to science itself, either as a self-conscious methodological reflection or as an