Abstract

History of philosophy can be written as a history of rearguard actions. The origin of this obvious loss of competence lies in what has become the tenuous self-understanding of philosophy as a science. Accordingly, one can assume that the question «What is philosophy?» can rather be answered via an investigation of what has become the problematic relation between science and philosophy. This relationship is unfolded both in its historical dimensions and in terms of the nature of the matter. To start off with, it is shown why philosophy in classical antiquity founded itself as scientifi c philosophy and why the newly founded natural sciences in modernity could become a decisive context that philosophy could borrow from. Modern philosophy, in contrast, commences at the moment where this strict coupling with the sciences is questioned. From now on one deals with a halved map of philosophy, on which an analytic and a continental tradition thread are spun. A dilemma grows out of this, a dilemma on which the question «What is philosophy?» permanently feeds. That part of philosophy that considers itself as a science can at best ignore the other part of philosophy which is critical of science, but it cannot grasp the latter as philosophy. In turn, the philosophy that does not understand itself as science cannot acknowledge the forms of thought that conform to science as philosophy in the true sense. This complementary visual impairment in relation to each other should be corrected by a theoretical model which describes philosophy as a social system with a specifi c social function that can be fulfi lled by both the science-conform and science-critical philosophy