Philosophy through the looking glass: On narrative, philosophical self -images, and the nature of philosophy

What is philosophy? No question in philosophy is of greater import: not simply because no answer to this question goes uncontested but because at stake are the very standards by which philosophical excellence is to be measured. In answering this question, one specifies what is to count as philosophy's proper aim, methodology, and starting point. At the same time, it is unclear that any general response could satisfactorily answer this speculative question: either empirically irresponsible or another misguided attempt to weave a grand metanarrative of legitimacy, perhaps the question is better understood as a pseudo-question. Nevertheless, what might it mean for someone to philosophize without some sense of methodology, aim in view, or starting point from which to begin? In answering these questions one orients oneself in philosophical space and time: by knowing one's way about in thought and deed one comes to know what one is about.;This dissertation aims at providing a speculative answer to the question "what is philosophy?" by developing a philosophical narratology the functions of which are twofold: providing fundamental orientation and establishing philosophical legitimacy. Defending the claim that philosophy is a tradition of rational inquiry the status of which is always in question, philosophy is seen to hold the promise of rational self-transformation. This promise is attained by the rational orientation of self to world along four axes of intelligibility: the somatic, interpersonal, temporal, and moral axes. A competing set of philosophical self-images is taken as our starting point: understood functionally as a narrator of a philosophical narrative, a philosophical self-image stands as a mimetic appropriation of common life: prefigured by the domain of practical activity, this narrator configures the philosophical tradition anew with the hopes of reconfiguring his or her interlocutors by means of a philosophical catharsis.;Philosophy as a form of self-transformation promises to answer Socrates' question: how is one to live? Competing philosophical narratives offer competing means of selving philosophically: oriented to competing visions of the good and committed to competing sets of virtues, different sorts of people thus come to see themselves as inhabiting different sorts of worlds.