Some think that philosophy, in relation to the sciences, can and should conduct a "conceptual analysis" of the concepts which "found" the sciences. In a different way, Collingwood has argued that metaphysics is the study of the "presuppositions" of the sciences. The common thread that runs through this school of thought is the implicit or explicit assumption that the "concepts" or "presuppositions" are "ours," that is, are merely subjective.
Thus, even such elementary "concepts" as space and time -- which in modern physics is just treated as one "concept," space-time -- become something external to reality as a whole or the absolute. This of course has been defended forcefully by Kant. In his own vivacious language, Kant argued that space and time are merely our forms of intuition, i.e. forms of receiving representations, and not the properties of things in themselves. According to Kant, if we assumed that these were the properties of things in themselves, there will have to be a theory of how our subjective thought might successfully "correspond" or represent these forms. Here, the problem of skepticism arises.
From Kant's point of view, it was impossible, or at least impractical, to establish a definitive theory of how space and time could be accurately "represented" by our consciousness. One problem to be investigated further is whether such a theory is indeed impossible. Could the impossibility of such a theory be proven?
On the other hand, if such a theory could be successfully established, then it becomes possible to discover the truth not only of the subject-matter of a science but also of the relation between this subject-matter and that science qua conscious activity. It might even be true that such an activity just is this relation.
Based on this thought, the task of philosophy in relation to the sciences becomes something other than "conceptual analysis." Rather, it is to map out the relations between the activity of science and the subject-matter of science in a theory which is true. To put it another way, philosophy discovers the concepts of science as being part of the "world" which the sciences describe objectively.
This is a way out of what Williams calls the "egocentric predicament" of Descartes's cogito and, to a considerable extent, those theories which stem from the Cartesian standpoint. (As a largely unrelated point, it might also be fruitful here to imagine a project where a philosopher interviews the scientists and "maps out" the sciences in a series of dialogues without fully comprehending the finer details of what each science claims. The philosopher, along with the common reader, would be "alienated" from the majority of the thoughts in such a work, but nonetheless that objective body of text would be closer to a true theory of the activity and subject-matter of the sciences than a schematic account given within the severe limits of an individual thinker's capacity of knowledge.) One hypothesis worth exploring further is the idea that our brain-mind has a universal capacity for scientific knowledge in general, and that such a capacity reflects, in some way yet to be specified, the laws and concepts which objectively exist in the world and in the subject-matter which the sciences treat.
Such a standpoint is no longer that of trying to give a "conceptual analysis" which is external to what the scientists actually think when they comprehend their scientific theories. To return to the example, if space and time are treated as space-time, a single concept whose content is rigorously defined in a way alien to what a non-physicist or a philosopher might intuitively imagine it to be, then it is the non-intuitive rigorous definition of space-time which needs to be grasped in philosophy. This is why it is vitally important for philosophers to "listen" to the scientists as closely as possible, even when such a willingness to listen might not necessarily be accompanied by an equal measure of comprehension.
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