Abstract

As a discipline, that is, a department of knowledge and learning, philosophy, inevitably, must have a system of rules or a method, for the maintenance, proper conduct, and transmission of its specific task. But philosophy’s task is not only to be executed in an orderly fashion: it is itself constituted by a set of rules, the rules of orderly or disciplined thinking. As a branch of knowledge and instruction, the discipline ‘philosophy’ thus has its own proper canon. Without the canon of its elected books, the harmonic ordering of its corpus, and the strict rules to be observed not only in learning or teaching it, but in philosophizing as well, philosophy would not be recognizable as a discipline. For these are what give it its identity. Hence, this canonicity, and in particular, the domain of established fundamental rules for thought within it, profoundly affects our understanding of philosophy. Indeed, depending on what these rules are said to be, the discipline of philosophy fans out into the diverse definitions that it has been historically assigned.