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So there is really no getting behind philosophy. And any attempt to bypass it, or dismiss it, or show that its glories are delusions, is making a move in the very same ball game. The dismissive hard-headed scientist (say) who confidently pronounces the whole activity to be worthless, is not relying on science to deliver such a view. He is philosophizing, and may be doing it well or badly.
> To do it well he would need a view about what makes an inquiry worthwhile, about truth and appropriate ways of finding it, and about what human beings can achieve by way of proof and understanding. To whom should he turn to form intelligent views about such matters? He can rely on his own first thoughts, and is probably doing so, but that is always an unwise strategy. For he is in the same arena as Plato, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, and many others. You can start on the path, by all means, with the firm intention of unseating their doctrines and substituting better ones. But do not think that you thereby escape the thickets and snares that entrap the traveller.

n ethics, absence of critical reflection is simply capitulation to whichever network of moral ideas makes up the climate at the time. It is the same with ideas that are not so obviously ethical.

"What
is philosophy?" is a reflexive
question in the threefold sense: it is about philosophy, it
is raised by philosophers themselves and, last but not least,
it represents an old and difficult philosophical problem. This
reflexivity is the reason why trying to find out what philosophy is
inevitably becomes not only a way of dealing with philosophy but actually
the way of doing philosophy. Once we start discussing philosophy we
cannot escape its intellectual grip. Even an explicit denial of philosophy
remains within its spell - it is a kind of self-refuting philosophy
at best, an unreflected act of theory hatred (misology) at worst. In this
sense one can talk about the inescapability
of philosophizing independent from its potential benefits.

Derrida's treatment of the family,
above all the brother-sister relationship and the figure of Antigone,
points to a place in "the Hegelian system where an ethics is glimpsed
that is irreducible to dialectics and cognition, which [he] would call an
ethics of the singular," a recognition that ethics begins when the other
is grasped not as "an object of cognition or comprehension, but precisely
[as] that which exceeds my grasp and powers" (210-11).

In Book Four, psychological attitudes are initially divided into
different kinds in order to avoid running afoul of what we might call
the principle of non-opposition in our explanations of human
experience. According to the principle of non-opposition, which bears
comparison with Aristotle's formulation of the principle of
non-contradiction (Metaphysics G3 1005b19-20), "the same thing
will not be willing to do or undergo opposites in the same respect, in
relation to the same thing, at the same time" (426b8-9). Now, it seems
obvious that many people very often experience psychological conflict,
and it seems natural to explain this psychological conflict in terms of
opposition between psychological attitudes. But our desire to allow
opposing psychological attitudes in our explanations needs to be
rendered consistent with the principle of non-opposition. With many
psychological conflicts, this is easy, for the opposing attitudes might
be in relation to different things (an attitude in favor of drinking a
martini conflicts with an attitude in favor of drinking champagne) or
the opposing attitudes might be non-simultaneous (as Hobbes thought to
be the case in all psychological conflicts). But what about cases in
which we seem to experience opposing attitudes in relation to the same
thing at the same time? Don't we sometimes have an attitude in favor of
drinking what is in the cup and a simultaneous attitude opposed to
drinking what is in the cup (437b-439d)? We can accept this phenomenon
and explain it without running afoul of the principle of non-opposition
only by supposing that the opposing attitudes do not oppose "in the
same respect," and we can do this readily by supposing that we have, on
the one hand, appetitive attitudes that arise in us as animals,
independent of our considerations about what is good for us, and on the
other hand, rational attitudes that track what we conceive to be good
for us.

The second complication is that some people are not perfectly ruled
by one class of their attitudes, but are subject to continuing
conflicts between, say, attitudes in favor of doing what is honorable
and appetitive attitudes in favor of pursuing a shameful tryst.
Socrates does not concentrate on these people, nor does he say how
common they are. But he does acknowledge their existence (544cd, cf.
445c).

human well-being
(eudaimonia) is the highest aim of moral thought and conduct;
the virtues (aretê=‘excellence’) are the
requisite skills and character-traits