Galen Strawson on the topography of philosophy

I find philosophy a profoundly concrete, sensual activity. The world of ideas is as solid as the world of seas and mountains, or more so. One can no more change its topography than one can move Oxford closer to London, although one can discover new views or discover that one has got the topography wrong, or that many people have for many years. Ideas seem as embodied, in the world of ideas, with its views and obstructions and vastness, as we do in our material world. They seem tangible, with specific savours, aesthetic properties, emotional tones, curves, surfaces, insides, hidden places, structure, geometry, dark passages, shining corners, auras, force fields and combinatorial chemistry.

From Real Materialism and other essays, Oxford University Press, 2008. 

Galen Strawson on Philosophy

It's often said that argument is the heart of philosophy, and especially of analytic philosophy, but I'm sure that's not true, if argument is thought of as primarily a matter of formally arrayed premisses and conclusions. Argument in this sense is the handmaiden of philosophy, an underlabourer (the head underlabourer), to be summond as necessary. All arguments have premisses, after all, and not all premisses can be argued for on pain of never getting started. The fundamental philosophical activity, I think, is a kind of open, investigative dwelling on ideas. It may well make use of formal argument, but it need not, and it is at its heart an essentially looser matter of redescribing things, putting them in other ways, spreading them out descriptively, telling stories that articulate and animate them.

From Real Materialism and other essays, Oxford University Press, 2008.