A living worldview must consciously respond to the present rather than past problems

Evidence

Note II . Philosophy cannot be separated from the history of philosophy, nor can culture from the history of culture. In the most immediate and relevant sense, one cannot be a philosopher, by which I mean have a critical and coherent conception of the world, without having a consciousness of its historicity, of the phase of development which it represents and of the fact that it contradicts other conceptions or elements of other conceptions. One’s conception of the world is a response to certain specific problems posed by reality, which are quite specific and “original” in their immediate relevance. How is it possible to consider the present, and quite specific present, with a mode of thought elaborated for a past which is often remote and superseded? When someone does this, it means that he is a walking anachronism, a fossil, and not living in the modern world, or at the least that he is strangely composite. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1170

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘philosopher’ as one having a critical, coherent, historically-conscious conception of the world — core of Gramsci’s redefinition of the term.
• XREF: Reads as groundwork for the notion that inherited ‘common-sense’ categories are themselves historical deposits — will connect to later Islamophobia readings on how inherited Orientalist categories are anachronistic responses to past colonial problems.