Out of The Books: Field Philosophy

Many philosophers, from Socrates to William James or Leibniz, have conducted inquiries and constituted what is now called in social sciences, "fields". How can we inherit from them? And what is our specificity, as philosophers, in relation to the practices of the human and social sciences? Based on a field experience that questioned the usual routines of the inquiry, and in particular the practice of anonymity, this article proposes to think about how these routines have some effects both on the people surveyed, and on the knowledge produced with or upon them. This gesture of questioning the practices which forces us to adopt other ways of addressing the situation leads the philosopher inquirer to consider his investigation as a real experiment, and thus it subjects the inquirer to the obligation to think of inquiry as a creative practice. On analysis, one realizes that it is not however proper to the philosophical inquiry, but that it is the essential dimension of any them, be that the scientist explicitly claims it or that she tries on the contrary to minimize to make her inquiry a copy of the reality she claims to reveal.