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Philosophy may be defined as critical appropriation of all the main types of self-understanding and life-praxis, emphatically including, although in no way exhausted by, our self-understanding and life-praxis simply as human beings in the ultimate setting of our lives.

It is because philosophy emphatically includes critical appropriation of our self-understanding and life-praxis simply as human beings that it includes the central disciplines of transcendental metaphysics, broadly understood, and transcendental ethics---both of which are properly sciences, although philosophy itself is not science but wisdom. But it is because philosophy includes critical appropriation of self-understanding and life-praxis of all other main types as well that it also includes, although, again, it is emphatically not exhausted by, all the so-called peripheral "philosophy of ..." disciplines (e.g., philosophy of religion, philosophy of law, and philosophy of science). 

22 November 2008; rev. 1 July 2009