Philosophy is unique. There is no other academic discipline that has laboured for so long under such a massive misconception as to what its basic task ought to be.

The proper basic task of philosophy is to keep alive awareness of what our most fundamental, important, urgent problems are, what our best attempts are at solving them, and what the relative merits and demerits of these attempts are. A basic task is to articulate, and improve the articulation of, our fundamental problems, and make clear that there are answers to these problems implicit in much of what we do and think – implicit in science, politics, economic activity, art, the law, education and so on – these answers often being inadequate and having adverse consequences for life and thought in various ways as a result.

Philosophy should also try to help improve our attempted solutions to our fundamental problems, by imaginatively proposing and critically assessing possible solutions, all the time making clear, where relevant, that different possible solutions have different implications for diverse aspects of life. As a result of improving our attempted solutions to our fundamental problems we may thereby contribute to the improvement of our lives, and help us make progress towards a good world.

Even though these are the proper, fundamental tasks for philosophy, it hardly needs to be said that none of these tasks can be said to be the exclusive domain of philosophy or academic philosophers. Quite the contrary, a central task of philosophy is to stimulate as many people as possible to think about fundamental problems imaginatively and critically - that is, rationally. Philosophy is not to be characterized, or delineated from other disciplines in terms of who does it, but rather in terms of the fundamental character of the problems being tackled, and perhaps the value of the contribution in question.

What, then, are our fundamental problems? Our most fundamental problem of all, encompassing all others, can be put quite simply like this:

How can our human world, and the world of sentient life more generally, imbued with the experiential, consciousness, free will, meaning and value, exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe?

Some will reject the idea that the ultimate reality behind the natural world is physical in character. For example, there are those who hold that the ultimate reality is God. In order not to exclude such views in an a priori fashion, as it were, we need a broader formulation of the above problem:

How can our human world ... exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the real world?

I interpret the first formulation of this problem in such a way that it encompasses all of academic thought, from theoretical physics, mathematics and cosmology, via the biological and technological sciences, to social inquiry and the humanities. It also encompasses all practical problems of living - problems facing individuals, groups, institutions, societies, nations, and humanity as a whole. The key idea of this conception of philosophy is that philosophy is concerned to help solve rationally our most fundamental problems.