This one comes from trying to sum it all up for a research statement for a job application:
"A theme that emerged from my work on Oakeshott was the identification of the different categories of thought and the relations between them. In contemporary society, the category of thought with which we identify a given statement is recognized to be a highly controversial issue; witness the use of the term 'category mistake' by the Archbishop of Canterbury to explain why adherents to Biblical creationism were mistaken in refusing to accept the Darwinian theory of evolution. The suggestion here is that science and religion represent different kinds of thinking that must not be confused on pain of irrelevance. Clearly, this is a consequential as well as a contested subject; it materially affects, among other things, how the state funds education.
Yet there is no history of the philosophical enterprise of distinguishing what Oakeshott called the various 'modes of experience'. His own classification of the fundamental divisions of thought (into scientific, practical, historical, philosophical, and aesthetic 'modes') was clearly indebted to Kant's attempt to identify the categories underlying the understanding and Hegel's division of logic, nature, and mind. However, it also became apparent that the classification of the various regions of thought has been a central task of Western philosophy since its beginnings, and has often had significant moral and political implications.
Whether one studies ancient, mediaeval, or modern philosophy, one discovers the persistent attempt to arrange the various forms of thought into a hierarchy, and identify one form which can be set above all others. Be it Platonic dialectic, scholastic theology, or natural science, philosophers have consistently sought such an intellectual trump card. At the same time, this dominant tradition has periodically met with sceptical and pluralistic opponents who have persistently exposed the shortcomings of this strategy. Arguably, in our own time, this has been the true meaning of post-modernism, often unclear to post-modernists themselves; figures such as Heidegger and Derrida are symptomatic of the final recognition in Western thought of an inescapable, though not indeterminate, intellectual pluralism.
Such recognition has been forced upon philosophy by an increasing awareness in the last two hundred years or so, not only of its own historicity, but of the historicity of all thought. This historicity of course extends to the discipline of history itself as well as to the natural sciences. Moral and political controversies like those alluded to at the outset are ultimately due to a refusal to countenance either the historicity of thought or its inherently pluralistic character (though neither of these positions license scepticism about the possibility of conditional truths). This, in brief outline, is the narrative I wish to explore in a major research monograph on the history of philosophy."