Philosophy, as I conceive it, is a journey and a quest. Conducted individually, it is nevertheless a collective attempt on the part of human beings from differing cultures and times to make sense of the arbitrary contingency of human existence, to find meaning in life. So understood, the impulse to philosophise needs no explanation or apology. It belongs to us all, and it exerts its own categorical imperative. Here I may quote the words of a wise woman, an invented contributor to this debate, who spoke of the common mind, the common store of wisdom which has the power to outlast the individual. ‘For this’, she said, ‘is what philosophy is: not an esoteric discipline, but the common endeavour of the human race to understand and come to terms with its own perilous, fragile and ultimately ephemeral existence’ (Almond, 1990, 185).

It is an interesting irony that it was philosophers committed to respect for ordinary language—philosophers who made what the ordinary person would say the final court of appeal in conceptual analysis—who rejected this popular perception of the goal and purpose of philosophy. And I, like all my contempories and most of my successors, began my academic pursuit of philosophy by learning from my tutors that philosophy was not to be understood as an attempt to find ‘the meaning of life’. It is a further irony that A. J. Ayer, the most prominent of those tutors, ended his life and career with a book of that title—not, of course, a deathbed conversion, but a very typical parting gibe at the popular conception (Ayer, 1990).