Alt Text
It would not be surprising if the discipline of “philosophy” depended for its continuing vitality on the tension between its different poles - between interest in the structure of the natural world, interest in forms of argumentation, and interest in “what would be for the best”.
I strongly suspect that a radical dissociation of these interests has already occurred, and the discipline of philosophy in its present configuration is held together only by a combination of historical inertia and a sentimentalized attachment to a mostly illusory image of a glorious past.
Once a unity like “philosophy” gets itself established, especially institutionally established, there is an almost irresistible tendency to find or create a single unitary genealogy for the enterprise, which means both a unitary history and a unitary, noncontextual goal.
There is a compulsion to make up a single rationale and project it back onto people who are then retrospectively declared to be “precursors.”
Raymond Geuss, "Goals, Origins, Disciplines" in A World Without Why