What is philosophy?* How a philosopher proceeds and what goals he or she pursues, how he or she distinguishes between good and bad philosophy? Being interested in such questions is sometimes labeled as metaphilosophy, and while much of metaphilosophical work so far was concerned with 'systematic' issues, our aim is to turn our metaphilosophical gaze onto the history of philosophy.
We shall have two conferences, *gathering people interested in the self-conception of philosophy *up to the very recent past. The chronological dividing line between them will be roughly 1725, for we believe that the emergence of successful Newtonian science was a serious blow to the preceding self-conception(s) of philosophy, and that philosophy had to reinvent itself afterwards.
*Some of the questions we are interested in *are: Did metaphilosophy play an important role in the past philosophers' agenda? If they held metaphilosophical views, did their philosophical practice follow them? Was there more agreement on the metaphilosophical level than in argumentative practice, or vice versa?
*We are inviting* submissions on individual philosophers and/or schools, as well as of a comparative kind (within the chronological limits of each conference).
