Abstrakt
There are several ideas about what philosophy is. Three of them are presented here: (1) philosophy as a love for wisdom, (2) as a science according to Edmund Husserl's proposal, and (3) as a discipline by university institutions.
In which way can they be recognizable in weaving a doctoral thesis? In practice, they can be identified thanks to the description of the first-person experiences concerning an Italian doctoral student researching Husserlian ethical phenomenology in Germany. Although these three concepts are not contradictory to each other - and their mutual complementarity would be profitable - sometimes they are reduced from one to the other, or one would disappear due to criteria which are not always philosophical.
Writing a doctoral thesis under these conditions is often similar to weaving the web of Penelope, doing and undoing it. However, from various points of view, it does not have to be a tragedy.