This article articulates a fundamental crisis of disciplinary philosophy—its lack of disciplinary self-consciousness and the skeptical problems this generates—and, through that articulation, exemplifies a means of mitigating its force. Disciplinary philosophy organizes itself as a producer of specialized knowledge, with the apparatus of journals, publication requirements, and other professional standards, but it cannot agree on what constitutes knowledge, progress, or value, and evinces ignorance of its history and alternatives. This situation engenders a skepticism that threatens the legitimacy of disciplinary philosophy. (...) The article proposes a response to this skepticism, rooted in the conditions that philosophers evince a specific kind of awareness of their own activity and its professional and cultural location, demonstrate this awareness by articulating it in the practice of philosophy itself, and recognize that precisely such articulation lies at the core of the Socratic idea of philosophy as a form of self-knowledge. (shrink)