Why is There Something Called Philosophy Rather than Nothing?

Extract

My title is intended to invoke at least two primary reference points or associations. The first, and most obvious, is a question that is very often assumed to be exemplary of the kind of bewildering puzzles that philosophers are distinctively preoccupied with – the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ The second is perhaps less easy to identify. A set of lectures delivered by Heidegger in the short period between his restoration to the academic life after the Second World War and his final retirement from it was published under the title ‘Wass Heisst Denken?’ Its English translation was given the title ‘What is Called Thinking?’; and if that title does not explicitly carry the same layers of significance evident in the German original, the concept of a ‘call’ at least keeps open the possibility of recovering many of them. For when Heidegger asks ‘what is called thinking?’, he means to imply, first, that not everything which gets called thinking really merits that honorific label; second, that it is therefore worth thinking about what form of human activity or passivity would really call for the use of that term; third, that this in turn will involve thinking about what, in our present and conceivable forms of inhabiting the world, really calls out for or provokes such a thoughtful response; and fourth (since he deliberately raises this question immediately upon his temporary re-inhabitation of a university post) that we will thereby find ourselves thinking about whether, and if so how and why, genuine thoughtfulness can find a home in the university, and thereby a place in the broader economy of a culture – whether anything recoverable from the venerable traditions of philosophy in the name of thinking might still be something for which any university, and any human cultural form, can see any call for.