[6] Nicholas Bunnin and Jiyuan Yu write that the separation of first- from second-order study has lost popularity as philosophers find it hard to observe the distinction.
[13] The term is derived from Greek word meta μετά ("after", "beyond", "with") and philosophía φιλοσοφία ("love of wisdom").
"[14]Some other philosophers treat the prefix meta as simply meaning 'about...', rather than as referring to a metatheoretical 'second-order' form of philosophy, among them Rescher[15] and Double.
[18] In the analytic tradition, the term "metaphilosophy" is mostly used to tag commenting and research on previous works as opposed to original contributions towards solving philosophical problems.
[20] Henri Lefebvre in Métaphilosophie (1965) argued, from a Marxian standpoint, in favor of an "ontological break", as a necessary methodological approach for critical social theory (whilst criticizing Louis Althusser's "epistemological break" with subjective Marxism, which represented a fundamental theoretical tool for the school of Marxist structuralism).
Paul Moser writes that typical metaphilosophical discussion includes determining the conditions under which a claim can be said to be a philosophical one.
Some philosophers (e.g. existentialists, pragmatists) think philosophy is ultimately a practical discipline that should help us lead meaningful lives by showing us who we are, how we relate to the world around us and what we should do.
[citation needed] Others (e.g. analytic philosophers) see philosophy as a technical, formal, and entirely theoretical discipline, with goals such as "the disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake".
[21] Other proposed goals of philosophy include discovering the absolutely fundamental reason of everything it investigates, making explicit the nature and significance of ordinary and scientific beliefs,[22] and unifying and transcending the insights given by science and religion.
[24][25] Defining philosophy and its boundaries is itself problematic; Nigel Warburton has called it "notoriously difficult".
If someone asks the question what is mathematics, we can give him a dictionary definition, let us say the science of number, for the sake of argument.
He described critical philosophy as analysing "unanalysed concepts in daily life and in science" and then "expos[ing] them to every objection that we can think of".
While speculative philosophy's role is to "take over all aspects of human experience, to reflect upon them, and to try to think out a view of Reality as a whole which shall do justice to all of them".