Since the inauguration of philosophy among the ancient Greeks, the definitive mission of the enterprise has been to address the “big questions” regarding mankind, the world, and our place in the human and natural scheme of things. The task has been to elucidate how we should understand these matters and what we can and should do to implement this understanding in action.

These issues set the philosophical agenda as cultivated in Greek antiquity, and give rise to a tripartite division of the discipline into logic (the theory of thought), metaphysics (the theory of existence), and ethics (the theory of human conduct). It equipped the agenda of Greek philosophy with such topics as truth, knowledge, mathematics, justice, novelty, reality, and analogous key issues of enduring human concern.

But these fundamental issues were only the starting point. Questions always have presuppositions and these raise further questions. Over time the range of issues or the question-agenda grows substantially larger and becomes changed in matters of emphasis and orientation. Later questions were given out of attempts to grapple with earlier ones. The problem-agenda of a particular thinker or era is bound to reflect the state of knowledge of the day, the climate of opinion of the culture, and the specific connections of individuals. It is bound to be diverse and variable.

The individual philosopher is of course free in the choice of problems, unfettered in his work, and unhampered by any need for agenda balance. With individuals this does not matter. But at the communal level it does. But the wider community bears an obligation to the discipline as a whole and neglects major areas of thematic orientation at its own peril.

The definitive task of the philosophical enterprise is systematic in its constituting mission to provide a comprehensively integrated account of the salient problems. The situation of medicine is not dissimilar here. The individual physical may coordinate in the eye but the medical professor cannot afford to leave the ear out of it. And essentially the same thing holds with regard to philosophy. If the enterprise is to succeed, then somehow the collective spirit of the discipline must put its hidden hand to the task of overall correlative integration and systematization.