Interrogating lived experience

What do we do when we do philosophy? And what should we do? What method in philosophy is likely to resolve puzzles and lead to reliable, insightful and potentially useful “truths”? As Stephen Mulhall has explained in his 2014 Grahame Lock Memorial Lecture, ‘in no subject other than philosophy is the basic nature of the subject (and so the core self-understanding of its practitioners) perennially not only open to question but actively in question.’ Mulhall also gives an analysis of the muddled and abysmal designations of “analytic philosophy” and “continental philosophy”, which have contributed significantly to the often vexed exchanges between philosophers who assert adherence to either of these camps; the upshot being that the designations themselves are somewhat bogus and confused oversimplifications. And so it is apposite that The Philosopher and its new editor, Anthony Morgan, set the theme for this first issue under his stewardship as doing philosophy. In what follows, I will give a brief account of the questions which are motivating my current research and how I go about addressing them