What Is Philosophy?

Believe it or not, the question of what philosophy is, while itself a philosophical question, is actually kind of difficult to answer. You could say that philosophy is what philosophers do, but when you ask what philosophers do, you'd realize the first answer was pretty circular... and yet it's not so off the mark as one might expect...

Anyway, the folks at Philosophy Bites decided to ask this question to a good number of leading philosophers, and here are their answers:

And if my own take is at all worth your time, I would probably say that philosophy, broadly speaking, is the recursive activity of working out the right way to think about any particular subject. And in case you're confused, this meta aspect of philosophy (thinking correctly about the correct way to think) refers to the investigation of the conditions under which a particular way of thinking is appropriate or inappropriate, and why.