I just noticed this thread and have not read it through so please excuse my question if it has already been asked and answered; what do you mean by "highest"? Most comprehensive or overarching. most critical, most meta-cognitive? Or most spiritual, most enlightening, wisest?

The move from philosophical to scientific language is toward a thinner, more conventionalized and less synthetic account of the same or similar phenomena (Nietzsche vs Freud, Merleau-Ponty vs embodied cogntivism). — Joshs

I'm not sure. I'll have to think about that.

I would add that empirical concepts are in their own way ‘high-fallutin’. But what does this mean? — Joshs

As I noted, for me, high-fallutin language grasps for an exalted level of significance, which I reject.

"You are presupposing a conscious mind, but I deny a conscious mind." So has this person stopped doing philosophy? Nope, in fact they haven't. The philosophy goes on. — Leontiskos

We're in a circle. We can keep this up all day long with no hope of reaching a conclusion.

- We're not. It's fairly obvious that the philosophy goes on. If someone posts a thread arguing that conscious minds do not exist, we do not close the thread because it is non-philosophy. Your claim about the presupposition of philosophy is just incorrect. But your definition of psychology is also incorrect, which is why I would suggest that you try to clean up your argument altogether.

As I noted, for me, high-fallutin language grasps for an exalted level of significance, which I reject. — T Clark

Maybe I misunderstand this point. By high-fallutin do you mean technically complicated language, such as that used by educated professionals? Or do you mean bullshit masquerading as insight?

By high-fallutin do you mean technically complicated language, such as that used by educated professionals? Or do you mean bullshit masquerading as insight? — Tom Storm

There's no reason it can't be both. In this particular case I think "bullshit masquerading as insight" is probably a bit strong. How about gilding the lily.

By high-fallutin do you mean technically complicated language, such as that used by educated professionals? Or do you mean bullshit masquerading as insight?
— Tom Storm

There's no reason it can't be both. In this particular case I think "bullshit masquerading as insight" is probably a bit strong. How about gilding the lily — T Clark

It would help if you could give some concrete examples of highfalutin language in philosophy. I’ll give some for you and you tell me if I’m off base. Many of my favorite philosophers (Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida) have been accused of writing in an obscurantist style. It has been suggested that this is a deliberate strategy to attract a cult-like following of initiates into what appears to outsiders as a secret society. Since I know the work of these writers very well, I will say that there isn’t a single word chosen by them that isnt preceded by an enormous amount of careful thought, becuase the aim is to capture the meaning of their their thoughts in words in a manner that is as faithful and precise as possible. I would go further and claim that in a deep sense, their concepts are more precise than the engineering vocabulary associated with your profession. Why do these philosophers tend to be accused of bullshit, obfuscation and obscurity? It’s pretty simple They are culture’s crystal ball, venturing into virgin territory of ideas, for which there is no established vocabulary. So they have to invent a new language, or use familiar language in strange ways, stretching and pulling it to say new things. Readers struggling to catch up with the difficult new ideas become discouraged and lapse into blaming the messenger’s style of expression rather than the novelty of the message.

@srap tasmaner, @joshs, @leontiskos, @fdrake, @t clark, @wayfarer, @moliere and apologies to anyone I've mistakenly ovelooked.

It looks to me that there are three positions in question, starting from the OP and moving in very interesting ways through the thread. (And let me remind folks that my OP really was a kind of test-drive of what I called the Top-Level Thesis about philosophical discourse. I'm not personally committed to a particular take on "highest" and I wanted my frequent expressions of dubiety to show this.)

So:

1. Does philosophy have at its disposal a special kind of recursive ability, by which it can fend off challenges about its legitimacy? As far as I can see, only @fdrake has tried to give this some formal rigor, and I'm still working on a response to his thoughts about it. I know that @Leontiskos and perhaps others have their doubts about the use of formalism here, and that leads to . . .

2. If we can isolate the precise nature of what it is that philosophy seems to do -- this sort of jujitsu move against attempts to assimilate it into other disciplines -- what will we have achieved? Let's say we can find a formally precise description of this. Is there anything that tells us this is what rational inquiry is? That this is what the philosophical use of rationality consists of? That other disciplines can't do the same thing?

3. Even more strongly, what gives me or anyone the right to assert that any version of rational inquiry, whether formalized or not, is what philosophy does exclusively? I think we're all comfortable with saying that philosophy often does this, or has historically done this, but do we have a warrant for saying that this kind of discourse is definitional of phil.? My OP allowed that assumption; what I wanted to question was the worth of the Q recursion, not whether phil. is inherently rational, and not whether there might be other understandings of what it means to be rational.

I also want to note a couple of points that @Srap Tasmaner raised. The first concerns the role of justification in phil. It does seem clear to me that we can know, and perhaps even state, any number of truths that we can't justify rationally. (We may be able to justify that they aren't irrational, but that's different.) Am I assuming, in the OP, that the business of phil. is to provide rational justifications? If so, then as Srap pointed out, I've stacked the deck heavily against, e.g., the Freudian who wants to opt out of that sort of discourse. We can all agree that the Freudian is doing something different with his "Very interesting . . . " response, but am I entitled to say that it's no longer philosophy? If I say this, do I need a better reason than "He's opting out of rational justification"? Or do I have an additional argument at my disposal that shows that this is precisely why he's no longer doing phil.? Obviously this has great significance for how we're going to value the Q recursion.

Srap's second point follows from this. He said, with disappointment, that what seemed to him the interesting issues raised by the OP never really got discussed. He saw most of the thread as preliminary thus far. I agree. I think what happened is that we all quickly realized that we didn't have unanimity about the Q recursion, and so one of the key assumptions of the TLT -- that there was this highest rung that phil. could avail itself of -- needed debate and clarification. Just as one "for instance": If any discipline can in principle offer its own recursive refutation of its practices, then the whole premise of the TLT collapses.

For me, the deeper interest here is good old "thinking and being." The OP ended by bringing in Hegel and his dialectical concept of refutations, as an example of how an innocent recursion might point us to some very important truths. This was a gesture. But if we can get ourselves on some kind of firm footing about the nature (or at least one nature) of phil. discourse, we could then ask what this teaches us about how thought and reality may mirror each other. Or not, of course!

I have some thoughts about all of this, but wanted to try laying this out first, just to see if it makes sense as a summary.

A few quick, specific responses:

my primary argument is against setting philosophy up as some sort of pinnacle of human inquiry. I don't see it as all that special. For me, it is an exercise in self-awareness - more a practice than a study. — T Clark

This is the question of the first part of the OP, and your answer may well be true. What we want to know, I think, is whether phil.'s lack of specialness is because a) the Q recursion isn't special to phil. at all, or b) this kind of recursive argumentation is indeed merely a gotcha! generated by a type of formalism we can look at and understand.

In my view, philosophy in its most general sense refers to a mode of discourse melding comprehensiveness, unity, and explicitness. — Joshs

I like the sound of this, but I have to ask for more clarity. A great novel can be shown to meld all three of these qualities, but does that make it philosophy? What about a beautiful prayer? Perhaps you would say that the missing element in both examples is explicitness. What, then, are the discursive tools by which explicitness comes to be? I'm nudging you toward taking the "rational inquiry" idea a bit more seriously. And let's remember that rationality is not univocal. Two of the philosophers I've gotten the most from, Gadamer and Habermas, spent their lives trying to formulate better versions of what it means to be rational, versions that would provide an escape from the crushing scientific rationalism of the 19th century.

I don’t believe there is any domain philosophy tackles that science can’t venture into. I think we agree it’s just a matter of style of expression. — Joshs

Really? Unless you include both math and metaphysics within science, I don't see how this could be true.

The final thing I find interesting about these quoted responses is that they all shy away from the idea that phil. is distinguished by its subject matter. We may disagree about whether phil. is a practice, a discourse, an exercise, a style of expression, but no one seems to believe phil. has a subject all its own. Is that relevant to the question of whether or how phil. could be "highest"? (Or maybe that's why it's a particularly appealing form of bullshit!)

See my response to @Wayfarer, and the long response above. It would be my hope that we could discover a path to wisdom that is strictly philosophical.

I don’t think Conze says or implies that. — Wayfarer

To me he very clearly implies it, but I guess I can't insist on my own interpretation.

The purpose of my quoting the Edward Conze text was simply an illustration of the idea of there being a higher truth - something for which I am generally criticized for suggesting. But to get down to basics, this is because I don't think our culture possesses a vertical axis along which the description of 'higher' makes any sense. — Wayfarer

This is such a strange way of framing what you're doing. Of course if you want to introduce people to a new idea ("the axis of quality") you must be prepared to justify it, this is quite normal. Saying you are "criticized for suggesting" your ideas makes it sound like you're being persecuted, is that how it feels to you?

And of course it would be so nice if your ideas were culturally embedded in your society so you didn't have to argue for them at all, a lot of us probably wish for that.

One funny thing about all this is that you included the word "discourse" in the title. Every time I was writing "philosophical discourse" I wondered whether I couldn't just say "philosophy".

But that's part of the issue here. We want to look at how philosophy *talks* to other disciplines, and how we interrogate that splits: we can look at *how* that works, and @fdrake and I followed your lead there a bit; but we can also look at *why* philosophy talks this way.

The why question also offers two natural courses: this is something philosophy does in reaction to other disciplines; or this kind of interaction is just a natural consequence of philosophy doing what it does, a sort of side effect.

If you want to know what philosophy is, you could just look at philosophy. You would only look at how philosophy interacts with other disciplines if you believed, or hoped, that something about philosophy is clearer in such interactions, maybe something that is hard to see by just examining philosophy directly. (There is a third option, which is the typical sort of comparison, without interaction: philosophy is more abstract, more general, blah blah blah.) And then you look at how philosophy talks to other disciplines to understand how it interacts with them.

You could carry this out without a plan, just to see what you get, but then it's hard to know what you're getting. (Am I looking at a feature specifically of philosophy's interactions with other disciplines, or a feature of philosophy proper? Among other questions.)

I think it might be better to ask first why we might thing the interaction of philosophy and other discipline might be particularly revelatory. What do we expect an examination of those interactions to show?

Heh, more preliminaries!

It would help if you could give some concrete examples of highfalutin language in philosophy. — Joshs

I was specifically talking about the language being used in this thread about the nature of philosophy, e.g. "Is philosophy the highest discourse." It's true, I am a fan of ordinary language philosophy (OLP), which, now that I think about it, is sort of a high-falutin way of saying plain, everyday speech. Maybe I'll start a thread "High-falutin philosophical language," but they'd probably put it in the Lounge. By the way, it appears that the correct spelling is "high-falutin," - one "l", although whether it should be a single word, two words, or a hyphenated word is unclear.

Many of my favorite philosophers (Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida) have been accused of writing in an obscurantist style. It has been suggested that this is a deliberate strategy to attract a cult-like following of initiates into what appears to outsiders as a secret society. — Joshs

No, I wasn't thinking about that at all. I do admit I have little patience for unnecessarily difficult language. Supposedly Einstein said that if you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't really understand it. II know that if I can't put an idea in my own words, I don't understand it. Now that I think about it, I don't think the ideas we bounce around in philosophy need to be all that nuanced and subtle. Clearly you don't agree with that.

more precise than the engineering vocabulary associated with your profession. — Joshs

Hey! Don't you dis engineering.

Now that I think about it, I don't think the ideas we bounce around in philosophy need to be all that nuanced and subtle. — T Clark

I'm all for clarity and simplicity, and it annoys me greatly that philosophical genius doesn't always go along with a good writing style, especially in translation. But can you think of anyone other than the OL philosophers whose ideas are not nuanced and subtle? And even that is being hard on the OL folk. Or maybe we have a whole different idea of what a nuance or a subtlety is?

If so, then as Srap pointed out, I've stacked the deck heavily against, e.g., the Freudian who wants to opt out of that sort of discourse. — J

As I said earlier, he holds that theories of motivation require justification, so he hasn't opted out. Beyond that, philosophy doesn't have a single answer to the question of ultimate justifications. There are many different epistemological approaches, and all of them are philosophy. The point here is not that philosophy is bound to a position of infinite justification claims (the classical philosophical position opposes this claim). The point is that there is no in-principle limit to philosophical inquiry or argument.

Srap's second point follows from this. He said, with disappointment, that what seemed to him the interesting issues raised by the OP never really got discussed. — J

I doubt we all agree on what the interesting issues are. I see the OP as essentially asking whether there is a substantive manner in which philosophy is highest. I think a lot of people were more interested in shooting down other planes than trying to fly their own.

For me, the deeper interest here is good old "thinking and being." The OP ended by bringing in Hegel and his dialectical concept of refutations, as an example of how an innocent recursion might point us to some very important truths. This was a gesture. — J

Right.

What we want to know, I think, is whether phil.'s lack of specialness is because a) the Q recursion isn't special to phil. at all, or b) this kind of recursive argumentation is indeed merely a gotcha! generated by a type of formalism we can look at and understand. — J

Okay, so what do we mean by "recursive argumentation"? Some candidates are: philosophy can offer infinitely recursive justifications for its claims; philosophy must offer infinitely recursive justifications for its claims; philosophers can debate endlessly. The philosophy/philosophers distinction is important.

You seem to have this set piece in mind: A philosopher and a psychologist are arguing about whether philosophy is useful. The philosopher continually says to the psychologist, "But you are doing philosophy here! How can you say that it is useless?" You want to say that this is a "gotcha," which turns the whole thing pejorative and subjective. The only way to address this set piece is to define what we mean by 'philosophy' and 'useful' (or whatever alternative for 'usefulness' we deign appropriate). Or else you could try to define what counts as a 'gotcha', but I doubt that will go far.

-

For me these sorts of issues come back to something like Srap's claim elsewhere, which says that different kinds of justification are incomparably different. If that is right then there is no such thing as logic in the older sense of 'the art of correct reasoning' (or the study of justification which you are associating with philosophy).

But can you think of anyone other than the OL philosophers whose ideas are not nuanced and subtle? — J

I strongly take issue with OLP not being nuanced. My God, read "A Plea for Excuses." Subtlety, maybe that's a little harder to say. Certainly OLP doesn't usually leave points implicit, or make them only indirectly. But if a subtle point is a small and easily overlooked one, that too is in OLP's wheelhouse.

I think a lot of people were more interested in shooting down other planes than trying to fly their own. — Leontiskos

It is hardly outside the mainstream to think philosophy's mission might be principally if not exclusively critical. Starts with a guy called 'Socrates' ...

In my view, philosophy in its most general sense refers to a mode of discourse melding comprehensiveness, unity, and explicitness.
— Joshs

I like the sound of this, but I have to ask for more clarity. A great novel can be shown to meld all three of these qualities, but does that make it philosophy? What about a beautiful prayer? Perhaps you would say that the missing element in both examples is explicitness. What, then, are the discursive tools by which explicitness comes to be? I'm nudging you toward taking the "rational inquiry" idea a bit more seriously. And let's remember that rationality is not univocal. Two of the philosophers I've gotten the most from, Gadamer and Habermas, spent their lives trying to formulate better versions of what it means to be rational, versions that would provide an escape from the crushing scientific rationalism of the 19th century — J

Habermas grounded rationality in a Kantian a priori, whereas Gadamer located the basis of reason in contingent discursive hemeneutical practices. I think leaving Habermas’s essentialism behind, and taking Gadamer’s practice-based approach further can help us to see why the attempt to separate philosophy from other disciplines on the basis of any formal properties or logics is ill-conceived. I think this attempt to fix a sovereign standpoint for philosophy is the flip-side of the equally ill-conceived attempt to locate a sovereign ground for empirical truth in the ‘facts of nature’. In fact, the two tend to imply each other. The manifest image of philosophical conceptualization and the scientific image of nature, the ideal and the real, belong to a Kantian-type idealism. After all, modern realism was Kant’s invention.

Practice-based accounts can allow us to avoid turning the rational tools of philosophy into a spinning in the void, divorced from the empirical nature it conceptualizes in language. Philosophical inquiry, like all modes of linguistic expression, is practical engagement with a world that is already organized as discursive cultural systems or patterns. We don’t first concoct linguistic concepts and then impose them on the world. Our use of language is already embedded in and formed on the basis of the system of real, material interactions that it belongs to. Any formal system of rationality or logic one wants to associate uniquely with philosophy will have no more claim to universality or primordiality than other contingent cultural practices. There is no way we can climb above these contextual practices, no way to locate a method of thinking that surveys or organizes them from sideways on.

I don’t believe there is any domain philosophy tackles that science can’t venture into. I think we agree it’s just a matter of style of expression.
— Joshs

Really? Unless you include both math and metaphysics within science, I don't see how this could be true — J

What do you mean by metaphysics? You dont consider a scientific paradigm to be a metaphysical stance? And given that logic and mathematics have been developed by both philosophers and scientists, I would say that their status can’t easily be placed with respect to the latter disciplines.

my primary argument is against setting philosophy up as some sort of pinnacle of human inquiry. I don't see it as all that special. For me, it is an exercise in self-awareness - more a practice than a study.
— T Clark

This is the question of the first part of the OP, and your answer may well be true. What we want to know, I think, is whether phil.'s lack of specialness is because a) the Q recursion isn't special to phil. at all, or b) this kind of recursive argumentation is indeed merely a gotcha! generated by a type of formalism we can look at and understand. — J

To start, could you run "Q recursion" by me again. I looked at all the examples in this thread and it's still not clear. Are you talking about "This statement is false?" Or, maybe, I like cake and I know I like cake and I know I know I like cake? Or maybe what @Leontiskos has been talking about, e.g. I say "Philosophy requires a conscious mind" and he says "'Philosophy does not require a conscious mind' is a valid philosophical statement."

I love philosophy. I just don't think it should be approached with reverence. At bottom, my understanding of the world is based on my own experience. It's reasonable to call me a pragmatist. My interest in science and my career in engineering have had a big influence on that. Philosophy is meant to be useful. It isn't a game, although it's fun to play. Well, maybe it is a game, but it's a useful game.

The final thing I find interesting about these quoted responses is that they all shy away from the idea that phil. is distinguished by its subject matter. — J

Hmm... I hadn't thought about that. Is philosophy distinguished by its subject matter? I'll have to think about it.

It is hardly outside the mainstream to think philosophy's mission might be principally if not exclusively critical. Starts with a guy called 'Socrates' ... — Srap Tasmaner

But that's a plane, not a shot. If the substance of philosophy is criticism then you're on the runway.

What?

Supposedly Einstein said that if you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't really understand it. II know that if I can't put an idea in my own words, I don't understand it. Now that I think about it, I don't think the ideas we bounce around in philosophy need to be all that nuanced and subtle. Clearly you don't agree with that — T Clark

He also said that he chose physics over biology because of the complexity of the subject matter the latter deals with.
The ‘explain it to me like I’m a six year old’ line reminds me of the corporate mentality that argues anything worth saying should be sayable in one sentence. Of course they think this. It’s in the very nature of for-profit business that there exists a direct relation between demand for a product and the size of the population who recognize that product as useful and valuable. In other words, that product must tap into widely shared conventions of meaning and use. This is precisely the kind of thing that can be described in a sentence. What can’t be described in a sentence is a product which requires the initiation into a new way of life, and a new set of conventions.

If someone thinks Socrates' gadflyishness captures a manner in which philosophy is highest or unique, then they should argue that thesis. They should say, "Philosophy is highest because because it is the critical discipline par excellence," or something to that effect.

One relevant example of "Shooting down planes," would be, "It is elitist to say that philosophy is highest, therefore I will try to argue against anyone who gives an argument for philosophy being highest." There is too much moral bleed into this thread for my taste. Some are arguing about the relations between disciplines, some are arguing against elitism, and some are arguing around "gotchas" or bad actors. We're not on different pages, we're in different books.

The final thing I find interesting about these quoted responses is that they all shy away from the idea that phil. is distinguished by its subject matter. — J

I think part of the difficulty here is that philosophy and science began as monozygotic twins. Given the way scientific specialization has occurred, philosophy probably represents "science" conceived as an undifferentiated totality.

If so, then as Srap pointed out, I've stacked the deck heavily against, e.g., the Freudian who wants to opt out of that sort of discourse.
— J

As I said earlier, he holds that theories of motivation require justification, so he hasn't opted out. — Leontiskos

In the example Srap imagined, he did opt out. Rather than supplying the justification for his theories of motivation, he puts on his Freudian hat and says, "Very interesting . . .Tell me more about the sorts of occasions you feel the need to justify yourself" or some such. The distinction matters, because what the Freudian holds, and would have to defend, is different from what he has to do. I would say that, if he continues in reason-giving, then you're right, he's doing philosophy with us. But what he may hold to be true is different from what he may or may not choose to justify. If he doesn't make that choice, then . . . well, I want to say he's no longer doing philosophy, but certainly others on this thread would disagree.

Notice that this speaks to an earlier concern of Srap's, that my example with the Freudian was hopelessly unrealistic. And indeed, I was imagining the Freudian as absolutely committed to responding to the philosopher with yet more reasons and justifications -- so much so, that he'd abide by the decisions of a Rational Referee. My point was only that, if he does that, he has not succeeded in refuting philosophy on its own terms. But he may not do that at all, and it's an open question whether his style of challenge has its own merits, and if so, what they are.

Gotta run now but I'll catch everyone later . . .

One thing that should be evident is that philosophy is not a distinct set of well defined set of practices with an agreed upon starting point, foundation, or common language. When it is argued that philosophy is or is not this or that there might be that very different exemplars are being used to defend that position.

Is Heracleitan flux or Parmenidean fixity assumed to be primary? Arguments on both sides continue to be made after all this time. If philosophy represents

an argumentative pinnacle — J

then it is a precarious one that requires holding fast to something that others are only too quick and willing to dislodge.

When argumentative skill is regarded as the arbiter of truth philosophy has lost its way. This has been something that philosophers have wrestled with at least since the time of Socrates. Plato framed it in terms of the sophists ability to make the weaker argument stronger, but what stands as the stronger argument is a matter of persuasion. Plato did not think of philosophy as so pure as to not make use of sophistical arguments. It is because of the importance of persuasion that Aristotle thought it of great importance to teach rhetoric.

The boundaries between disciplines is historically and culturally contingent and changeable. Was Aristotle doing philosophy when working on metaphysics and doing something that is not philosophy when he worked on biology or politics? Was Wittgenstein doing philosophy or something else when he said?

Working in philosophy -- like work in architecture in many respects -- is really more a working on oneself. On one's interpretation. On one's way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.) (Culture and Value, 16)

Well that's certainly clearer.

We're not on different pages, we're in different books. — Leontiskos

And that does make fruitful conversation difficult, but it also raises the ceiling of what we can attempt to do, I think: even if every participant brings their own presuppositions, the discussion itself has none.

For myself, I feel like I have a foot in every camp. I say the things I say, but I could as well say other things. I'm almost never happy with anything I post. I always want to start over and try something completely different, not just tinker and fix up what I've already said. In happy moments, I see this restlessness as philosophical.

I participate in discussions like this one, in some part, in hopes of figuring out what hold philosophy has on me, why I keep doing it, what it is I'm doing.

In the example Srap imagined, he did opt out. Rather than supplying the justification for his theories of motivation, he puts on his Freudian hat and says, "Very interesting . . .Tell me more about the sorts of occasions you feel the need to justify yourself" or some such. The distinction matters, because what the Freudian holds, and would have to defend, is different from what he has to do. I would say that, if he continues in reason-giving, then you're right, he's doing philosophy with us. But what he may hold to be true is different from what he may or may not choose to justify. If he doesn't make that choice, then . . . well, I want to say he's no longer doing philosophy, but certainly others on this thread would disagree. — J

But psychologists don't opt out of giving justification for their psychological theories of motivation. So it seems to me that we're talking about a fictional character. Or we're talking about a psychologist who is doing something stupid or stubborn qua human, not qua psychologist. Just as the philosopher bent on the 'gotcha' is doing something stupid or facile qua human, not qua philosopher. Humans do stupid things, and there are a few philosophers and psychologists who are also human. But not everything a real or fictional psychologist/philosopher does is representative of psychology/philosophy.

Note too that even the psychologist you envision would justify his diagnosis to a fellow psychologist who challenges him on it. He is not altogether refusing justification when talking to the philosopher; he is merely condescending on the basis of the premise that the philosopher lacks self-knowledge (whether that premise is true or false). He is intentionally talking past the philosopher, but this capacity for "talking past" is not unlimited, such that he refuses the notion of justification itself.

See also:

If the philosopher believes he's on firm ground demanding to know how the psychologist knows what he claims to know, the psychologist believes himself to be on ground just as firm in examining the philosopher's motives for demanding justification. — Srap Tasmaner

Aquinas does talk about the way that the intellect and the will are both infinitely recursive and intermixed, and you could think of "motive" as pertaining to the will and "justification" as pertaining to the intellect. That's fine as far as it goes, but that deep analysis of the will strikes me as philosophical, not psychological. It is certainly not psychological to the exclusion of being philosophical. The dispute between intellectualism and voluntarism has not historically been construed as a dispute between philosophy and psychology, even though it can truly be said that modern and contemporary philosophy are excessively intellectual. — Leontiskos

In happy moments, I see this restlessness as philosophical.

I participate in discussions like this one, in some part, in hopes of figuring out what hold philosophy has on me, why I keep doing it, what it is I'm doing. — Srap Tasmaner

Fair enough. And I don't think it is necessary to reflect on what philosophy is in order to do philosophy. Perhaps the best philosophers are not self-consciously concerned about what philosophy is.

If the philosopher believes he's on firm ground demanding to know how the psychologist knows what he claims to know, the psychologist believes himself to be on ground just as firm in examining the philosopher's motives for demanding justification. — Srap Tasmaner

Hmm, this drive to examine motives for justification. Who do you suppose was among the earliest, and perhaps still most radical, thinkers to situate the meaning of philosophical knowledge by way of values, and values by way of motives, and motives by way of drives? I’ll give you a hint. He had a very large mustache. And he would have critiqued Freud’s drive model on philosophical grounds, by demolishing the philosophical presuppositions undergirding Freud’s approach.

It had occurred to me.

Not that I'm happy with the choices I've made, but I have been choosing which cans of worms to open.