What is philosophy? What is its purpose? Its value?

Question

What is philosophy? What is its purpose? Its value?

Answer 1

its other peoples ideas  gives us food for thought  stimulates brain cells

Answer 2

The purpose of philosophy is to explore deeply-held opinions in the hopes of proving or disproving them.  Its value is consideration, deep-thinking and the sharing of ideas.  Also it makes everyone a know-it-all.

Answer 3

A bunch of crazy people tell others their thoughts, then get into big fights over it. :)

Answer 4

Philosophy is the love of knowledge (from the Greek, Philo--love, sophia--knowledge).  It was "education" back in the days of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.  All of the studies that we have now--Music, history, science, metaphysics, math, theology---everything, back then, was all under one subject-philosophy.

Over the centuries, our categories of knowledge have evolved quite a bit.  The discipline of philosophy has changed and evolved like crazy.  In some sense, we still see it as a kind of knowledge of all knowledge, in the sense that anyone who becomes a grand master of any particular discipline is awarded a PhD--A Doctorate in the Philosophy of----whatever they got their PhD in.

Philosophy floundered terribly after the Age of Reason. Newton had us all so jazzed with his clock model of the universes, we thought we were going to get everything all figured out, and then it didn't happen. The universe didn't obediently fall into nice neat little boxes we could get our minds around, and we found out that there was no way to find out the location and motion of every thing in the universe so that we'd be able to predict the future the way Newton promised.  Heisenberg discovered uncertainty.  Einstein forced us to admit that there was no center to the Universe, and then Quantum Mechanics came along with the discovery that you can't do a scientific experiment without skewing the outcome.

We found out, essentially, that the love of knowledge takes us to what appears to be a dead end--the knowledge that we can't know anything (actually, not a far cry from where Socrates started us off, but that's another story.)

Now, philosophy seems to be pretty well bogged down in the idea that everything we know comes from the language we use to talk about it, and that we have to figure out the whole nature of language in order to understand the universe.  There is a lot of exciting material in that, but ultimately, after having been convinced I wanted to be a philosopher, I found that rather disconcerting, and wound up pursuing literature instead. It felt to me like today, literature is exploring the very most exciting questions that they used to explore in Philosophy during it's peak times--what is life all about? How do we define a well-lived life, and how do we pull one off?

Other philosophers are interested in other aspects of the questions, but that's the hot one for me.

I know I've rambled way too long on this, but, hey, you HAD to ask!

Answer 5

Take the time to read some of the answers for a while....if you got the intelligence and patience

Answer 6

Philosophy is the search for meanings,  to understand, the desire to be more then what we are,

Answer 7

stimulate your mind

Answer 8

the pursuit of all that can be understood. knowledge is power. the power to capture and hold onto the things you want in life.

Answer 9

Science asks who where when what how.

Religion tells you why

Philosophy asks why instead.

Answer 10

seeking knowledge, finding knowledge, knowledge is the most valuable thing in the universe.

Answer 11

Philosophy is the creative and also scientific thinking that allows discoveries to be made.

Philosophical thinking is necessary as a foundation upon which such fields as law, econimics, politics, theology, and the sciences are based.

We also study philosophy in-and-of itself, and we study the philosophies of philosophers.

Philosophy has several main branches. (I am being sketchy because I have answered this question before so you can check my archives on this site).

The great moralists were philosophers,

the great scientists were philosophers,

and the great theologians and prophets were philosophers.