What We Do When We Do Philosophy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5007/1808-1711.2026.e114629Keywords:
Methodology, Philosophy, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Questions, Workshop DescriptionAbstract
In this paper, I present a reflective exercise on philosophical methodology. The aim of this exercise is to encourage people to think actively and reflectively on what they do when they do philosophy, and how they do it, both in terms of research practice and teaching practice. In addition to situating the motivation for the exercise in the broader tradition of philosophical methodology, I also report on an instance of this exercise that was undertaken at the Principia conference in Florianopolis, Brazil, in 2025, which I hope can be used as an exemplar for other people running similar exercises.
References
Baggini, . 2012. All That Matters: Philosophy. Hodder Education.
Flew, A. 1989. An Introduction to Western Philosophy: Ideas and Argument From Plato to Popper. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., revised edition.
Honderich, T.; Burnyeat, M. (eds.) 1979. Philosophy As It Is. Penguin Books.
Indraccolo, L. 2017. The “white horse is not horse” debate. Philosophy Compass 12:1–11.
Moore, G. E. 1953. Some Main Problems of Philosophy. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd; New York: Humanities Press Inc.
Nagel, T. 1987. What Does it All Mean: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy. Oxford University Press.
O’Hear, A. 1985. What Philosophy Is: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy. Penguin Books.
Peltonen, M. 2025. Francis Bacon. In Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, editors, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, Winter 2025 edition.
Uckelman, S. L. (preprint) Fanfiction, canon, and possible worlds. Preprint: https://philpapers.org/rec/UCKFCA.
Uckelman, S. L. 2009. Modalities in Medieval Logic. PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam.
Uckelman, S. L. 2010. Logic and the condemnations of 1277. Journal of Philosophical Logic 39(2): 201–227.
Uckelman, S. L. 2016. The logic of where and while in the 13th and 14th centuries. In Lev Beklemishev, Stéphane Demri, and András Máté (eds.), Advances in Modal Logic, volume 11, pages 535–550. College Publications.
Uckelman, S. L. 2025. Logic as liberation, or, logic, feminism, and being a feminist in logic. In Logica Yearbook 2023, pages 145–162. College Publications.
Uckelman, S. L.; Chan, P. 2016. Against truth-conditional theories of meaning: Three lessons from the language(s) of fiction. Res Philosophica, 93(2):1–19.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Sara L. Uckelman

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Principia http://www.periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/principia/index is licenced under a Creative Commons - Atribuição-Uso Não-Comercial-Não a obras derivadas 3.0 Unported.
Base available in www.periodicos.ufsc.br.
