Abstract
There is little doubt that, unless we confine ourselves to a conception of philosophia perennis, reflection on the nature, objects and claims of philosophy to knowledge, and on the relations it should or should not maintain with its past and with the other sciences (natural sciences, but also human and social sciences), has undergone considerable variation in the course of its history.
If we look at the recent history of philosophy, the question of knowledge of essences has been the object of acute attention, particularly since the 1970s, enabling the clarification of many concepts and problems relating, for example, to conceptual analysis, the nature of thea priori, the place to be accorded to thea posteriori, the possible reduction or otherwise of essence to modality, and the various forms thatessentialism can take, the concepts of natural species, foundation and necessity, whether we should continue to place the philosophy of language in the position of primary philosophy, whether we should hold fast to the idea of a "logical" basis for metaphysics or a fundamentally "modal" conception of philosophy, and whether we have finally equipped ourselves with the means to respond to the challenge of integration, which is supposed to ensure a rationally satisfactory link between metaphysics and epistemology.
The philosophy of knowledge itself, as we too often forget, has also made remarkable progress in elucidating the very nature of "knowledge", its objects and its agents, opening up a number of fruitful perspectives.
I'll come back to what I regard as the decisive milestones in this recent history of contemporary philosophy, but also to the invisibility that sometimes tends to emerge, of major philosophical problems, still unresolved, that we can't give up tackling, unless we sacrifice too much, this time, to certain philosophical "demands" of the century, and lose sight of the challenges still before us, not only of the integration of metaphysics and epistemology, but, more broadly, of what constitutes, in my view, the identity of philosophy, and hence of what ensures the discipline's autonomy and makes its existence not only legitimate but necessary.
