Ideas y Valores (Aug 2009)
The Historical-Conceptual Language of Philosophy
Abstract
In an essay devoted to the method of philosophy, Ernst Tugendhat (1989) warned about the scarcity of general methodological clarifications that this discipline offers for its own labor. Beyond the many ways there currently exist to make philosophy, and along its vast history, such lack of clarifications about the procedures can signal a lasting fault in the concept and scope of philosophy. Although Tugendhat is certainly right in his diagnosis, his proposal is quite incomplete and its formulation in the classical terms of the analytic tradition −according to which doing philosophy is a form of clarification in the use of linguistic expressions− must be completed with the historical feature which is peculiar to the discipline. However, in this paper I will not discuss this author’s thesis, but I will examine the methodological problem mapped out by him. The strategy is to start from what I consider a necessary previous step: to clarify the conceptual and historical dimensions of the philosophical vocabulary whereby this discipline handles its own topics. As a result, I will be able to derive some consequences vis-à-vis the method and goals of philosophy.
