Philosophy, I believe, following Wilfrid Sellars, is the effort "to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term."
It seeks to clarify the basic nature and goals of our various ways of dealing with the world. Its ambition is therefore to be maximally reflective: philosophy differs from other kinds of inquiry in that it aims to render explicit and critically evaluate the
implicit assumptions on which they