Our paper consists of four parts. In the first part, we describe the challenge of
the pervasive and permanent philosophical disagreement over philosophers’ epistemic
self-esteem. In the second part, we investigate the attitude of philosophers who have
high epistemic self-esteem even in the face of philosophical disagreement and who
believe they have well-grounded philosophical knowledge. In the third section, we
focus on the attitude of philosophers who maintain a moderate level of epistemic self-esteem
because they do not attribute substantive philosophical knowledge to themselves but
still believe that they have epistemic right to defend substantive philosophical beliefs.
In the fourth section, we analyse the attitude of philosophers who have a low level
of epistemic self-esteem in relation to substantive philosophical beliefs and make
no attempt to defend those beliefs. We argue that when faced with philosophical disagreement
philosophers either have to deny that the dissenting philosophers are their epistemic
peers or have to admit that doing philosophy is less meaningful than it seemed before.
In this second case, philosophical activity and performance should not contribute
to the philosophers’ overall epistemic self-esteem to any significant extent.
