10 WHAT PHILOSOPHY IS AND WHAT IT COULD BE * Elly Vintiadis Whenever the question of what philosophy is comes up, three quotes always come to my mind. The frst quote is from Wilfrid Sellars: “The aim of philoso- phy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” The second one is from David Hills: “Philosophy is the ungainly attempt to tackle questions that come naturally to children, using methods that come naturally to lawyers.” And the third comes from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: She asked him what his father’s books were about. Subject and object and the nature of reality, Andrew had said. And when she had said Heavens, she had no notion of what that meant. “Think of a kitchen table, then,” he told her, “when you’re not there.” The frst quote is the best description of philosophy. It is the discipline that aims to a general understanding of things; of ourselves, others, the world (broadly understood to include everything), our relationship to the world and others and the obligations (of all kinds) that such a relationship brings with it. This in- cludes a vast number of questions on every topic imaginable, from mathematics and science to art and religion, and from politics to metaphysics, including how these relate to each other, how they “hang together” in Sellars’ words: how religion relates to science, how mathematics relate to physics and metaphysics, * My title is inspired by Carrie Jenkins’ What Love Is and What It Could be, which, as well as being an excellent book on its subject, is a model of how to apply philosophical thinking to an important question that matters to people.