The world feels as though it is ever edging toward its bleak end in thermonuclear war, climate catastrophe, acts of terrorism, or some unholy combination of the three. In the meantime, individual worlds are continually being snuffed out by gross wealth disparities, brutal applications of force against marginalized communities, or by being gassed and bombed by cruel regimes, to name a few.

世界是一个非常残酷的地方，从不缺少痛苦。因此，毫不奇怪，各个领域的学者都被当下的形势所吸引，把他们的智力和研究能力转向更紧迫、更紧迫的问题。正是在这些艰难的时刻，如果我们想要摆脱惨淡的结局，我们可能会受益于思想家，他们可以帮助我们解决我们面临的极其复杂的问题。似乎只有哲学是不够的;we needpublicphilosophy.

Such an appeal for public philosophy has come from Adam Hosein, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado. Ina recent feature inPhilosopher, Hosein reflects on the value of public-oriented philosophical writing, which is something he himself embodies in writing on topics ranging from "prosecution for torture committed as part of the 'War on Terror', how politicians in the U.S. and Europe should discuss Daesh and its relation to Islam, the morality of Hamas' activities in Gaza, and the (in)justice of Trump's revised travel ban." Hosein's work "has grown in part out of my own direct experiences of racial profiling, fears of surveillance, and so on in the post-9/11 world. And it also came about because I was following various political debates and wanted to involve myself more int them." For Hosein, making a serious and helpful philosophical contribution or intervention to an existing discourse is itself a difficult, philosophical task that ought to be more appreciated.

侯赛因对公共哲学状态及其困难的新颖的反思，也表明了关于整个学科与世界需求的关系的有趣问题。Hosein并不是唯一一个声称哲学对我们更广泛的政治思考有独特贡献的人，而且“为做公共哲学制造障碍会阻塞我们哲学和政治能量的重要出口”。但是，如果我们进一步追问，哲学的独特贡献究竟是什么呢?我们能不能谈论一般的哲学呢?

Proponents for philosophy often tout the universal applicability or the sheer rigor of philosophical training, but, unless we overestimate how special philosophy really is and unfairly downplay the work in other fields, rigor is not something unique to philosophy. Though it might be true that philosophy, perhaps more than other disciplines, gets at the foundations of all kinds of study and forms of knowledge, having such a foundation would really only be fully useful if one were to indeed pursue those other fields as well. The contributions that a historian, a philosopher, an artist, a scientist, etc., are all different and important in their own ways—none of which can be entirely sufficient on their own.

But with the knowledge that philosophy is a sort of infinitely expansive field of study that can critically analyze anything from logic to power to responsibility, are there certain philosophical pursuits that are more urgent than others at a given moment? Is there any normative standard that we can apply to which questions take priority?

Knowing how intricately related seemingly "impractical" pursuits in logic or epistemology are to "practical" pursuits like political philosophy, it seems difficult to come up with a standard without unfairly shouldering important questions that might not immediately appeal to us. But it's hard to ignore the intuition that a standard must exist nonetheless, however difficult it might be to establish a totally fair one.

Facing our possible catastrophic end, should we be asking the questions that contribute the most—whether those questions are found in epistemology or political theory? Can it be wrong to spend time asking certain questions over others? Is there a right direction—or righter directions—for the field of philosophy to take?