Lost, Looking Around, and Looking Ahead

In this article I argue that contemporary philosophy is lost in several important senses and that its recovery requires that we understand philosophy as a fundamentally creative endeavor; an expressive, evocative, imaginative, and visionary art; an art of life, like poetry and theater, music and painting, films and sculpture, installations and architecture, graffiti and graphic novels, ballet and basketball; a province of meaning rather than, more than, fact. I show how this changed self-understanding in turn would change the questions philosophers ask. And I argue that this view of philosophy requires a commitment to pluralism in both theory and practice.