Philosophical arguments for philosophical argument: In memoriam Gary Gutting

Comment published on New York Times online blog, in response to op-ed essay by Peter Catapano, “In memoriam: What would Gary Gutting do?”, January 21, 2019:

This lover of "Continental" (German, French, Italian) Philosophy." is touched by Prof. Gutting's passing, with the bittersweet thought of the mortal vulnerability of the embodied subjects of the making and making sense of worlds in art and thought with the perfection of the well-made.

I most know Gutting through his superb and lucid histories of French philosophy of the last century, both religious and leftist. But he was also a generalist. Catapano captures the value of the kind of applied philosophy commenting on various subjects that Gutting apparently helped popularize. I have learned from his example and others in the Times column he co-edited of what this involves. It is not unlike a French philosophy exam: Faced with a topic you come across rather than having chosen to fit a theoretical agenda, you think out loud, and with the conceptual resources of the discipline.  

For the skill and task of the philosopher is to solve theoretical or practical problems by thinking about them, using concepts and arguments (with logical entailments) with precision and rigor. Finding and representing facts is not our concern; we are not journalists but thinkers. The aim of thinking is not to represent or reveal fact or experience but to make conceptual sense of, to "think," what we know. That is why we need the humanities, which can train for excellence at citizenship and living. We also should, like the French, require philosophy in high school.