On The (Im)Possibility of Philosophical Teaching According to the Pathos of the Philosopher

In this essay I expose two historical examples of the ambivalence of the place of philosophical knowledge in society. The symptomatic starting point is Aristotle’s char- acterization of the philosopher. Then, through the specification of Descartes’s views on philosophy, culture, the human and the artificial, I will show that there exists certain tension between the development of philosophy as a free knowledge available to every- one and philosophy as a specialized knowledge only suitable for initiates. Nowadays, when philosophy is in a critical situation maybe because of that ambivalence, the need arises to overcome this problem and democratize it.