Some philosophers assume language. Aristotle assumed language, as far as I know. It is unwise to assume language.<p>Philosophers manipulate concepts. This means that they create, destroy, morph, change, add to, take away from, and so on. They put concepts into certain sorts of relationships with other concepts. If it is true in Ruby that _everything_ is an object, I think it is a fair analogy to say that in philosophy everything is a concept. Concepts may be anonymous, like anonymous functions, but also concepts are labelled, and concepts have descriptions.<p>Philosophy has both a _what_ and a _how_. This is the same as any discipline. There is the subject matter of the discipline and also the methods (or if you want to be fancy, the methodologies) of the discipline. The difference between philosophy and other disciplines is mainly the subject matter. In philosophy the concepts are of a certain sort, abstract rather than concrete, though no-one knows as yet how to draw that distinction, some even disagree that there is the possibility of drawing a clear distinction.<p>[A side note. Even though humans are pretty adaptable, because humans have spent 99.99% of our evolutionary existence not being philosophers, we have a lot of systems in place that make us ill-suited for philosophizing. What I am trying to say is that learning _how_ to do philosophy (for a human being) is as much about learning how to overcome human fallibility and bias and prejudice as it is about learning how to think logically (this is overrated) and learning how to manipulate concepts like a boss (this is underrated).]<p>Concepts are conveyed from person to person using language. When one starts thinking about thinking you end up having to try to understand how it is that we are able to manipulate concepts in the first place and also how it is we come to acquire language. It is this conceptual and linguistic process that Wittgenstein could observe first-hand while teaching kids.