Category Archives: Thought

Reading the conventional; Reading Kwame Anthony Appiah

In many ways, there are few philosophers who seem better placed than Kwame Anthony Appiah to stretch, perhaps even radically reconfigure, our intellectual imaginations. Though a scion of the conjoined Asante and Gloucestershire aristocracies, his upbringing at the intersection of Ghanaian and English political and cultural worlds promised a sui generis sensibility. Though educated in some of the most formidably wealthy, powerful schools in the world, his subjectivity as a black, gay man afforded him opportunities to see his privileged world aslant. Though steeped in analytic philosophy, the grand Academy of Lagado in the humanities, his training as a medical student in biochemistry and physiology, his deep reading in Africana intellectual history, his abilities as novelist and critic, gave him entry into far more richly textured actually-existing worlds than the possible heavens and earths dreamed of by analytic metaphysics.

And yet few African philosophers have been as frustratingly conventional, as banally predictable. Elsewhere, in my book The Intellectual Imagination, I sought to sketch how Appiah’s philosophical work offers an angle into what remains potent and what is, alas, etiolated in the bourgeois imaginary — and I used the term “bourgeois” in a precisely descriptive, historical sense, not as an epithet. But I just now ran across an interview of Appiah that allowed me a second look into his conventionality. We are prone, no doubt from our Romantic inheritances, to thinking of the imagination as a form of flight, such that we think of its limits in terms of what it bumps up against, what cages it in. But this excerpt stands out to me for the way it shows the obverse of that problematic. The problem isn’t that Appiah is conventional; rather it is that he cannot think the conventional. His banality, in other words, is not so much a symptom as a generator of that very banality. We shouldn’t look, then, in the manner of a transgressive reading, to the limits of his imagination, nor should we look, in the manner of a paranoid reading, to what his conventionality symptomizes. We shouldn’t look to where his mind cannot go, to what prevents it from soaring; rather, we should look to how his mind cannot not soar. Below, an excerpt of the interview:

Robert S. Boynton: Another way to proceed might be to analyze different aspects of identity; to do for, say, your sexual identity what you’ve done for your racial identity. Is that an interest for you?
Kwame Anthony Appiah: People have asked me why, given that I’ve written so much about race, I haven’t written about sexuality in, say, the mode of queer studies. The answer I’ve given is that I did think philosophically about sexuality when I was starting out, and what struck me is that most of what one has to say was just responding to terribly bad arguments, and this did not seem very interesting to me.
Robert S. Boynton: But how is this different from the critical philosophical work you’ve done in the case of race, which also required that you respond to terribly bad arguments?
Kwame Anthony Appiah: Part of it is that I was better equipped to deal with bad arguments concerning the case of race because I had had a rather substantial education in biology. And evolutionary theory was one of the topics I was most interested in, so I actually know a lot about genetics and evolutionary biology.
In the case of race, I mostly concentrated on criticizing the best form of the wrong theory. The bad science in the case of homosexuality has mostly been psychoanalytic and, partly because I came to psychoanalysis through reading critiques of it, I’ve never had any time for it. Probably to an inappropriate degree, it makes me want to barf. It is just not a sensible way of thinking about sexuality. So disentangling my general skepticism about all explanations of homosexuality from my skepticism of these particular explanations would be difficult.
There is a separate problem, which has to do with the nature of ethics. Clearly attitudes toward homosexuals have a lot to do with views about the proper use of sex – the role of sex in pleasure, etc. And I must say that it is unclear to me why those are topics on which one ought to have any intrinsic moral thoughts. Sex is important because it produces pleasure, because it produces relationships, because it produces children, and all of these are of intrinsic moral importance. But sex itself is like, say, eating – it produces pleasure, it produces sociality, etc. – but we don’t have the sense that we should take eating seriously as a moral topic. I don’t feel as if I have anything special to say about sexuality, nor do I feel that it is my obligation to do so.
There is another difference between sex and race as philosophical topics. I am not a radical constructivist about sexual identity. I think there is something biologically there in the sexual sense. I think there is less there than most people think, but I don’t believe there is nothing. Whereas with race, I don’t think it is at all interesting from the biological point of view.
— Kwame Anthony Appiah and Robert S. Boynton. “On Philosophy, Race, Sex &c.” Daedalus 132, no. 3 (2003): 104-110.

Sophie Oluwole on Why Philosophers Can’t Read (Hint: They are Toothless)

ó d’ órí akáyín, àkàrà d’ eegun
(For the toothless, the cake becomes a bone)
— Sophie Oluwole

It is a striking dimension of North Atlantic philosophy that it has failed to find satisfaction in declaring unfamiliar or differing philosophical traditions “bad” or “poor” philosophy. Rather, it has desired a far more categorical victory in rendering these intellectual formations non-philosophical, anti-philosophical even. The Nigerian philosopher Sophie Oluwole, in the context of a brilliantly nuanced engagement with the Kenyan philosopher Odera Oruka’s Sage Philosophy Project, commented thus on this phenomenon:

Another important point which most of Oruka’s critics fail to recognize is the fact that an inadequate philosophy is philosophy still. This is why it is possible to access philosophical treatises in terms of degrees of success. A philosophy may be rationally inadequate for many reasons. It does not, by that token, become geography or mythology. Many analytic philosophers appear unable to distinguish between a work produced in a tradition different from their own and another produced completely out of philosophy. The tradition of analytic philosophers condemning continental philosophy as irrational and non-philosophical just because it does not fit within the analytic tradition can no more hold sway. Oruka’s Sage Philosophy Project was meant to demonstrate that such a move cannot be intellectually justified. Philosophers do not have to belong to the same methodological tradition even though they cannot opt out of reason.
— Sophie B. Oluwole, “Oruka’s Mission in African Philosophy”

Kant’s “Jewish Mind”

Stephen Greenblatt reminisces:

In 1969, in my first year of teaching at Berkeley, I was in the English Department office checking my mail (a ritual I repeated several times a day in the vague hope that something, as Mr. Micawber was fond of saying, would “turn up”). I was carrying a copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, though I can no longer remember why: perhaps I was actually reading it or perhaps I merely hoped to impress one of my new colleagues. If the latter was my motive, the strategy sorely backfired. A senior professor did indeed notice the book. “You are reading Kant, Greenblatt?” he said. (He was one of those who affect the brusque manner of address of the Oxford Senior Common Room.) “That’s right.” “I don’t like Kant,” he declared flatly. “Oh, why is that?” I ventured to ask. “Because Kant had a Jewish mind.” “A Jewish mind? What on earth do you mean?” “Clever, sterile, absorbed in endless hair-splitting subtleties — a mind without true culture.” “Oh,” I said, for want of something better to say.
— Stephen Greenblatt

Virginia Woolf, Priya Gopal, and Thinking While a Woman in the University

George Steiner’s pining for a university without women should be a reminder of the rupture that women occasion by their very presence in the university. Here is Virginia Woolf’s evocative account of thinking while a woman and of a university that makes those thoughts fugitive:

Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please–it is not a matter of any importance) sitting on 
the banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought. That collar I have spoken of, women and fiction, the need of coming to some conclusion on a subject that raises all sorts of prejudices and passions, bowed my head to the ground. To the right and left bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been.
There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought–to call it by a prouder name than it deserved–had let its line down into 
the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until–you know the little tug–the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. I will not trouble you with that thought now, though if you look carefully you may find it for yourselves in the course of what I am going to say.

But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind–put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting,
and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help, he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the path the arms of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession they had sent my little fish into hiding.

What idea it had been that had sent me so audaciously trespassing I
 could not now remember. The spirit of peace descended like a cloud from heaven, for if the spirit of peace dwells anywhere, it is in the courts
and quadrangles of Oxbridge on a fine October morning. Strolling through those colleges past those ancient halls the roughness of the present seemed smoothed away; the body seemed contained in a miraculous glass cabinet through which no sound could penetrate, and the mind, freed from any contact with facts (unless one trespassed on the turf again), was at liberty to settle down upon whatever meditation was in harmony with the moment. As chance would have it, some stray memory of some old essay about revisiting Oxbridge in the long vacation brought Charles Lamb to mind–Saint Charles, said Thackeray, putting a letter of Lamb’s to his forehead. Indeed, among all the dead (I give you my thoughts as they
 came to me), Lamb is one of the most congenial; one to whom one would have liked to say, Tell me then how you wrote your essays? For his
 essays are superior even to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought, with all their perfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, that lightning
 crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry. Lamb then came to Oxbridge perhaps a hundred years ago. Certainly he wrote an essay–the name escapes me–about the manuscript of one of Milton’s poems which he saw here.
…
It then occurred to me that the very manuscript itself which Lamb had looked at was only a few hundred yards away, so that one could follow Lamb’s footsteps across the quadrangle to that famous library where the treasure is kept. Moreover, I recollected, as I
 put this plan into execution, it is in this famous library that the 
manuscript of Thackeray’s ESMOND is also preserved. … Here I was actually at
 the door which leads into the library itself. I must have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a
 flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery,
kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.

That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library. Venerable and calm, with all its
 treasures safe locked within its breast, it sleeps complacently and
 will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep forever. Never will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger.

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

That Beadle, gesticulating wildly in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, his face contorted in horror and indignation, is George Steiner. I think we mustn’t underestimate the trauma, the disorientation, the sheer terror that clutches at Steiner and the male structures that he deputizes for when he chances upon women in the seminar room, at faculty talks, at high table. That’s what it’s often about, the deep grammar in the yowls about “political correctness,” the mewls about “free speech,” the sanctimony about “rigor,” standards,” “clarity,” “merit,” “real disciplines,” in the end often amounts to a recoil at the sheer presence of women — now increasingly black and brown women — in the university.

Ecologies of the Mind

“The mind too can be imagined as a landscape, but only the minds of sages might resemble the short-grass prairie in which I played with getting lost and vanishing. The rest of us have caverns, glaciers, torrential rivers, heavy fogs, chasms that open up underfoot, even marauding wildlife bearing family names. It’s a landscape in which getting lost is easy and some regions are terrifying to visit.”
— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“The mind has mountains, to lift a phrase from Hopkins, even for people who have spent all their lives in the flatlands; and most of us would be dazzled if the mountains turned out to yield sacred texts rather than terrors or an empty, confused landscape.”
— Michael Wood, Yeats and Violence

“My head is full of pebbles and rubbish and broken matches and bits of glass picked up ‘most everywhere.”
— James Joyce

“I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way. But in this water there are countless objects at different depths; and certain influences will give certain kinds of those objects an upward influence which may be intense enough and continue long enough to bring them into the upper visible layer. After the impulse ceases they commence to sink downwards.”
— Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce

i am a dirty little room
with spiders in the corner of my skull
my mouth a dark pit
into which human droppings disappear
the speck of rust in my heart worries me
many people breathe in and out of me
i am at ease with the world
only the speck of rust worries me
— Wopko Jensma, “Lo Lull” (1973)

Thinking/Thought

Hannah Arendt:

The deals Becher made through Kastner were much simpler than the complicated negotiations with the business magnates; they consisted in fixing a price for the life of each Jew to be rescued. There was considerable haggling over prices, and at one point, it seems, Eichmann also got involved in some of the preliminary discussions. Characteristically, his price was the lowest, a mere two hundred dollars per Jew – not, of course, because he wished to save more Jews but simply because he was not used to thinking big.
— Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Factually, my preoccupation with mental activities has two rather different origins. The immediate impulse came from my attending the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. In my report of it I spoke of “the banality of evil.” Behind that phrase, I held no thesis or doctrine, although I was dimly aware of the fact that it went counter to our tradition of thought — literary, theological, or philosophic — about the phenomenon of evil. Evil, we have learned, is something demonic; its incarnation is Satan, “a lightning fall from heaven” (Luke 10:18), or Lucifer, the fallen angel (“The devil is an angel too” – Unamuno) whose sin is pride (“proud as Lucifer”), namely, that superbia of which only the best are capable: they don’t want to serve God but to be like Him. Evil men, we are told, act out of envy; this may be resentment at not having turned out well through no fault of their own (Richard III) or the envy of Cain, who slew Abel because “the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard.” Or they may be prompted by weakness (Macbeth). Or, on the contrary, by the powerful hatred wickedness feels for sheer goodness (Iago’s “I hate the Moor: my cause is hearted”; Claggart’s hatred for Billy Budd’s “barbarian” innocence, a hatred considered by Melville a “depravity according to nature”), or by covetousness, “the root of all evil” (Radix omnium malorum cupiditas). .
However, what I was confronted with was utterly different and still undeniably factual. I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer — at least the very effective one now on trial — was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial police examination was something entirely negative; it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness.
In the setting of Israeli court and prison procedures he functioned as well as had functioned under the Nazi regime but, when confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he was helpless, and his cliche-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence. If we were responsive to this claim all the time, we would soon be exhausted; Eichmann differed from the rest of us only in that he clearly knew of no such claim at all.
It was this absence of thinking — which is so ordinary an experience in our everyday life, where we have hardly the time, let alone the inclination, to stop and think — that awakened my interest. Is evil-doing (the sins of omission, as well as the sins of commission) possible in default of not just “base motives” (as the law calls them) but of any motives whatever, of any particular prompting of interest or volition? Is wickedness, however we may define it, this being “determined to prove a villain,” not a necessary condition for evil-doing? Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought? To be sure, not in the sense that thinking would ever be able to produce the good deed as its result, as though “virtue could be taught” and learned — only habits and customs can be taught, and we know only too well the alarming speed with which they are unlearned and forgotten when new circumstances demand a change in manners and patterns of behavior. (The fact that we usually teat matters of good and evil in courses in “moral” or “ethics” may indicate how little we know about them, for morals comes from mores and ethics from ethos, the Latin and the Greek words for customs and habit, the Latin word being associated with rules of behavior, whereas the Greek is derived from habitat, like our “habits.”) The absence of thought I was confronted with sprang neither from forgetfulness of former, presumably good manners and habits nor from stupidity in the sense of inability to comprehend — not even in the sense of “moral insanity” for it was just as noticeable in instances that had nothing to do with so-called ethical decisions or matters of conscience.
The question that imposed itself was: Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually “condition” them against it? (The very word “conscience” at any rate, points in this direction insofar as it means “to know with and by myself,” a kind of knowledge that is actualized in every thinking process.”). And it not this hypothesis enforced by everything we know about conscience, namely, that a “good conscience” is enjoyed as a rule only by really bad people, criminals and such, while only “good people” are capable of having a bad conscience?
–Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

Thinking/Thought

Ghazals: Homage To Ghalib
Adrienne Rich
7/12/68

The clouds are electric in this university.
The lovers astride the tractor burn fissures through the hay.

When I look at that wall I shall think of you
and of what you did not paint there.

Only the truth makes the pain of lifting a hand worthwhile:
the prism staggering under the blows of the raga.

The vanishing-point where he appears.
Two parallel tracks converge, yet there has been no wreck.

To mutilate privacy with a single foolish syllable
is to throw away the search for the one necessary word.

When you read these lines, think of me
and of what I have not written here.

Thinking/Thought

Ludwig Wittgenstein:

“Thought must be something unique.” When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we — and our meaning — do not stop anywhere short of the fact; but we mean: this — is — so. But this paradox (which has the form of a truism) can also be expressed in this way: Thought can be of what is not the case.

Other illusions come from various quarters to attach themselves to the special one spoken of here. Thought, language, now appear to us as the unique correlate, picture, of the world. These concepts: proposition, language, thought, world, stand in line one behind the other, each equivalent to each. (But what are these words to be used for now? The language-game in which they are to be applied is missing.)

Thought is surrounded by a halo. — Its essence, logic, presents an order, in fact the a priori order of the world: that is, the order of possibilities, which must be common to both world and thought. But this order, it seems, must be utterly simple. It is prior to all experience, must run through all experience; no empirical cloudiness or uncertainty can be allowed to affect it. — It must rather be of the purest crystal. But this crystal does not appear as an abstraction; but as something concrete, indeed, as the most concrete — as it were the hardest thing there is

Here it is difficult as it were to keep our heads up, — to see that we must stick to the subjects of our everyday thinking, and not go astray and imagine that we have to describe extreme subtleties, which in turn we are after all quite unable to describe with the means at our disposal. We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers.

Language (or thought?) is something unique” — this proves to be a superstition (not a mistake!), itself produced by grammatical illusions. And now the impressiveness retreats to these illusions, to the problems.

“But you will surely admit that there is a difference between pain — behavior accompanied by pain and pain — behavior without any pain?” — Admit it? What greater difference could there be? — “And yet you again and again reach the conclusion that the sensation itself is a nothing.” — Not at all. It is not a something, but not a nothing either! The conclusion was only that a nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said. We have only rejected the grammar which tries to force itself on us here.
… The paradox disappears only if we make a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thoughts — which may be about houses, pains, and evil, or anything else you please.

Thinking/Thought

“Denken tut weh” (Thinking hurts)
— Georg Simmel

“The history of thought is the history of its models.”
— Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language

“Something is happening to the way we think about the way we think.”
— Clifford Geertz, “Blurred Genres: the Refiguration of Social Thought”

“I am convinced that there are ways of thinking that we don’t yet know about.”
— Adrienne Rich

“Thinking, like life, is never complete, it is a possibility that never exhausts itself.”
— Vincenzo Di Nicola

“All that we are is the result of our thoughts; it is founded on our thoughts and made up of our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world. If a man speaks or acts with a harmful thought, trouble follows him as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.”
— The Dhammapada

“Writing is thinking. That means that you won’t think unless you do it.”
— Sarah Beckwith

“We come to know what it means to think when we ourselves try to think.”
— Martin Heidegger, What is Thinking?

“Preoccupation with philosophy more than anything else may give us the stubborn illusion that we are thinking just because we are incessantly ‘philosophizing.'”
— Martin Heidegger, What is Thinking?

“The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.”
— Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

“Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.”
— Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

Moral Philosophy as a Set-Up: Debate, Normalization, and the Incorporation of Radical Criticism

Cora Diamond:

A great difference between Murdoch and contemporary moral philosophy lies in the very idea of moral philosophy as such a set of debates. From Murdoch’s point of view, these debates are set up, in the sense in which she speaks of the “world of facts” as something which philosophers have “set up.” What are taken to be “the problems of the field” will invariably involve background ideas — ideas taken to be unproblematic, not in question in the debates that define the field as it is taught. The shaping of such debates depends on a picture of the world and a picture or group of related pictures of the soul; deep moral attitudes are embedded in these pictures. The bringing to awareness of such compelling pictures and of their historical and cultural connections, the opening up of alternative ways of understanding moral philosophy, is itself a task of philosophy, to be set over against the conception of it in terms of a set of debates.

Here I shall borrow an argument made by Talbot Brewer, in relation to Elizabeth Anscombe and her radical criticism of moral philosophy. The force of such criticism is utterly missed, Brewer argues, when an attempt is made to fit it into the structure of moral philosophy as a set of debates. When moral philosophy is set out and taught as involving a “well-defined field of questions,” with “a series of competing answers to these questions,” we make it unnecessary for ourselves or our students to take seriously the “fundamentally conflicting views concerning … the main questions and concerns of the field itself” — a field that is “perpetually concerned with the proper specification of its own focal preoccupations.” He speaks of moral philosophy as having a “fundamentally reflexive subject matter,” a reflexiveness that is inconsistent with setting out the subject in terms of such a set of debates. When we try to take the ideas of a radical critic like Anscombe as a contribution to such debates, we “normalize” her views, pull the sting from them.

While Brewer’s argument — about how radical criticism can be normalized by being fitted into “the debate” — refers directly to Anscombe, it applies also to Murdoch; indeed Brewer brings out the similarity of some of their central concerns. Their view of analytic moral philosophy was that of insiders, but they had double vision: they saw it also in its cultural context, saw its unacknowledged commitment to specific values. They were themselves committed (though in quite different ways) to an understanding of the moral realm deeply at odds with the conventional understanding, hence their sharp awareness of what was taken for granted and what was hidden from view in that understanding of moral philosophy — of what its problems were, how they could be addressed, and what would constitute progress in their resolution.

Brewer brings out the generality of the issue that surfaces in their writings and in the reception of their writings: when moral philosophy is normalized, the problematic character of the relation between the wider culture and the construction of moral philosophy is suppressed. Normalization is a continuing process, as emerges in the recent construction of a debate about the relevance of empirical investigation to moral philosophy, so far as the construction of the debate excludes a conception of empirical investigation like Murdoch’s and takes serious attention to what is available in human experience to be attention to what is available through the methods of the various empirical sciences. Murdoch the explorer begins from the felt tension between moral philosophy shaped in a taken-for-granted way, moral philosophy as we present it to students and to ourselves, these problems, these arguments, these possible approaches — and moral philosophy as continually needing to question what its own concerns are or may be, what modes of thinking it may have cut off from consideration, what conceptual configurations it has built into its own understanding of the world it investigates.

(Cora Diamond, “Murdoch the Explorer”)