1 [James Alexander, ‘Oakeshott as Philosopher’, The Cambridge Companion to Oakeshott ed. Efraim Podoksik (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 9-41. ISBN 978 0 521 14792 7. This has a hinterland. I did a great amount of reading in order to make sense of not only Oakeshott but philosophy in general: it was the same reading which led to ‘The Four Points of the Compass’. Here I restore an introductory summary which was not included in the published version.] Oakeshott as Philosopher JAMES ALEXANDER ‘All understandings are conditional.’ 1 1. Introduction Oakeshott took philosophy to be thought without presupposition. If philosophy is thought without presupposition, then there are two possibilities. One possibility is that we must see it as subjective: where philosophy is understood to be the activity associated with skepsis, that is, inquiry or interrogation. All understandings are conditional, and only the activity itself is unconditional. This form of philosophy, as an activity, depends on no stated metaphysics; and if it has a presupposition it is that understanding is separate from experience – so it quite naturally ends in a complete scepticism. The other possibility is that we must see philosophy as subjective and objective at the same time – that is, as absolute. This is because philosophy is the experience of the order which is the necessary consequence of presuppositionlessness. Since there are no presuppositions, no distinctions, no determinations, then experience cannot be separated from what is experienced, and subject cannot be separated out of object; so that, in principle, there is an unconditioned which is the unity from which all determinations and particulars emerge. Here understanding is identical with experience. 1 Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), p. 98.