Die Philosophie der Philosophie: Was zeichnet genuin philosophische Fragen aus?

Philosophy cannot be studied without becoming engaged in philosophy itself. Taking Timothy Williamson’s seminal work “The Philosophy of Philosophy” as a point of departure for this analysis at hand, and a specific question therein, in his book, presented by him as genuinely philosophical, we discuss in this paper what characterizes distinguished philosophical questions and what does not. While Williamson responds critically to the so-called linguistic and conceptual turn considered central to (analytic) philosophy by contending that his chosen question, representative of many more, is philosophical but not even implicitly meta-linguistic or meta-conceptual, our contribution is different and threefold: first, in homage to Williamson, we show that he might not achieve his argumentative goal. Going beyond the limited framework set by his monograph, we further argue, second and more generally, that the predicate “being a philosophical question” (such as his model question) suffers from vagueness. Finally, third, we derive implications from our investigation for the meta-philosophical answers of the Linguistic and Conceptual Turns.