In the field of higher education there are few places reserved for philosophical exploration, and this, this author argues, can limit and distort the cartography. Higher education research tends to be framed as the empirical process of collecting and analysing qualitative or quantitative data. But this conception of research leaves little space for the philosophical, which is neither qualitative nor quantitative and neither collects nor analyses data. Even if one is open to philosophy, this conception of higher education research implies that philosophical, non-empirical, armchair research is either bad research or not research at all. So how should the field of higher education be framed? Macfarlane (2012) and Tight (2003) took a useful empirical route and "described" higher education research, but this author wants to take the more treacherous philosophical path and examine how it "should" be.He begins this path with the current state of higher education research (Sections 1-2) then moves through how it "could" be more philosophical (Sections 3-6) and into how it "should" be more philosophical (Sections 7-9).