Sunday, November 29, 2009

What Is Philosophy?


Philosophy, to start off from itself, means the love of knowledge, coming from 2 greek words called "Philos (φιλο)" and "Sophia (σοφία)". According to Wikipedia, Sophia means Wisdom, but according to our teacher, it means knowledge; and also according to our teacher, wisdom is not the same thing as knowledge (well, as we can see, they're written differently, but that is not the only difference) (=O!!). This got me into a messed up space in my mind everytime I would listen or think about wisdom and/or knowledge.
Anyway, in class we discussed about the objectives of philosophy. Philosophy was not made to solve problems, but to make new ones and study them from every angle. This also got me into a small mess, but it was easily cleaned as the classed goed by. For me, philosophy is the path to find tools to solve a problem. On our way to this tool, we will encounter more and more problems, but we must stay focused and know only what we need to know to keep on and find that tool. In class we discussed that solving problems is what the other sciences have to deal with, not philosophy, which deals with what I just said.
To talk more about the class and less about my thoughts, our teacher told us that philosophy has some characteristics:
-its not something that has existed
-doesn't care about the truth
-it states problems
-every human being is related to philosophy because its about thinking and problems and everybody thinks and has problems (special remarkment to drug users)
from here, we can say that philosophy gives meanings to problems, so we decide how and which ones solve, only think about, or forget them.
One thing I have to remark, its that, like my classmate Ernesto Camacho said, "philosophy establishes problems and then we can grow as specie because our natural curiosity and our constant desire of knowledge" (no grammar correcting process there), we will keep growing intelectually with our natural curiosity and our constant desire of knowledge, but our desire of knowledge depends deeply on our interests. You will only feel desire of knowledge of something you want or like, it can be from the making of chocolates to how do I connect Romantic thought with my dreams.. Our desire will only stop when we have reached our goal of knowing something, and that's when we have to find new dreams, explore the world to find things that will wake up our desire of knowledge again... In my case, IDK why, I am feeling empty... After I have known what i wanted to know (not ALL of it, but like 50%), I feel that knowing and developing wisdom, at the end of the road, there is nothing. My curiosity faded away with my desires... I hope its just a period of my life, and not an endless night...
P.D: Everybody: PLEASE COMMENT!! specially if you feel just like me, if you would like to discuss about Philosophy, and if you are a fellow classmates.

2 comments:

  1. that P.D. sounds a bit attencion needy you know

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  2. I really care more about the comments rather than the actual posts, so we can keep developing our skill on phylosophy and posting
    btw, attencion is not spelled correctly. it is ATENTION..

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