The Struggle That Philosophy Faces

Criticism and Competition in Academia

There are different types of philosophical works such as: 

1. Those that focus on unsolved philosophical problems.

2. Those that focus on the treatment of philosophical problems in the history of philosophy.

3. Those that use a lot of philosophical history to approach unsolved philosophical problems.

4. Those that start from outside the current narrow meaning of philosophy to approach philosophical problems (e.g., from science or art).

5. Those that try to combine these different approaches to solved philosophical problems.

The book The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture by Emanuele Coccia aims to contribute to the philosophical debate in the fifth type.

I will not review his book here. You can read it if you want to look at plants, what they are and how we see them, as a philosophical problem. Or you can kindly ask me to write such a review! 

What I am going to do here is to present Emanuele Coccia’s critique of philosophy as it appears in the prologue of his book.