Philosophy in Context: Reply to Trohler

This paper responds to Trohler's charge that my paper "As if by Machinery: The levelling of educational research" takes Francis Bacon's vision of scientific research out of context. I distinguish four senses of "decontextualisation": as ignorance, as belief in "timeless truths", as comparison of contexts, and as genealogy. I argue that Trohler has a case against the first sense and aspects of the second, but that his argument against the last two makes philosophy and philosophical conversation impossible and his own case self-annulling.