  As we have just seen, Quine’s views issue in very general criticism of much philosophy and indeed of the assumption that the term “knowledge” marks a clear subject of inquiry. It is, nevertheless, a mistake to think of him as primarily a critical or negative thinker: his criticisms rely on his positive doctrine, which in turn generates further questions. As for whether those are genuinely philosophical questions, it is implicit in what has already been said that he would not acknowledge such a category as the ‘genuinely philosophical’ if that is meant to imply questions which are different in kind from those of science. But certainly he accepts that some questions are sufficiently general, abstract, and remote from observation, that they may be classified as philosophical. At times he assimilates the questions with which he is concerned to those which have traditionally occupied philosophers. Epistemology—the theory of knowledge—is a clear example, although Quine’s approach to that subject is quite different from that of many philosophers.