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.