Philosophy and the Public Culture

Abstract

The task of philosophy as I envisage it, which is to make sense of the human world, stands always to be completed by the specific invocation of life as it is lived. The abstract universal must be measured against the lived particular, and philosophy, at least my kind of philosophy, is called to account by art. For me it has never been enough to explore the Lebenswelt in terms of a generalised philosophy of mind; the drama of the individual life always intrudes on my reflections, and asks me to say how, in this or that predicament, the philosophy can also be lived. In this paper I want to describe why I think it is important if philosophy is really to make sense of our world.