Philosophy as a Normative Discipline
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21371452 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Yao Lin (0000-0002-8254-8939, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-24 |
| Publication date | 2026-06-23 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Philosophy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0031-8191 • E-ISSN: 1469-817X |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0031819126101430 |
| OpenAlex | W7165651992 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 12 |
Bernard Williams contends that philosophy is part of a broader humanistic enterprise of ‘making sense of’ ourselves and our activities, including the activity of science. Whereas the scientific enterprise purports to offer an absolute conception of the world as it is (independently of any local perspective on it), the humanistic enterprise cannot disengage itself from the contingent history of our ideas upon which it operates. While I agree with Williams that philosophy should be more attentive to history, his account of philosophy, from which he derives this conclusion, is fatally flawed, being unable to meet three perennial challenges to any principled defense of philosophy as a discipline: i.e., the questions of authority, incubativity and peculiarity. Those challenges can be met only if we understand philosophy not as a humanistic discipline that is part of the broader humanistic enterprise, but as a distinctively normative discipline that tasks itself with finding answers to explicitly or implicitly normative questions, in contrast to various scientific and humanistic disciplines of descriptive inquiry. In this paper, I argue for the equivalence of philosophicality with normativity, explicate the theoretical and practical implications of the normative account of philosophy, and defend it against potential objections
Discipline · Equivalence (formal languages) · Humanism · Normative · Perspective (graphical) · Sociology of scientific knowledge · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications
| Highly cited | No |
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