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Wednesday, August 3, 2016

What is philosophy?

Existentialist philosophers claim that philosophy defies any definition since it doesn’t refer to any system of thought but the process of thought itself.  It is a mental activity and one of its distinctive aspects is reflection.  Yet, there is a common agreement among philosophers that philosophy, or this so-called “reflective mental activity,” is characterized by the following: critical dialogue, vision of the whole of reality, and rationality.  In this article, let me elaborate these three characteristics of philosophy.

        Critical Dialogue
         
        Philosophers are critical.  They ask questions because some answers do not satisfy their queries.  In the classical philosophical tradition, a student can freely ask questions to his/her master.  The master, on the other hand, does not impose his/her authority to stiff the wild imagination of his/her student.  There is no room for censorship.  The master-student relationship inculcates the value of open dialogue –yet a sort of dialogue which is critical. 

        Vision of the whole

        Philosophical questioning is also characterized by having the vision of the whole reality –that is, in the end of questioning, one is able to see a wider and deeper perspective in life and of things pertinent to life.  On the one hand, scientific discipline tends to compartmentalize knowledge.  Philosophical discipline, on the other, tends to gain a synthetic view of things one is at present investigating with.  Philosophy is a discipline that teaches to see not the individual trees in the forest but the whole of the forest.  This is something positive in philosophizing.  Yet it has a tendency to be highly speculative.  In most cases, a philosophy espoused by one thinker ends up very metaphysical, in the sense that it talks of something beyond our human senses can see, like the theory of “ideal forms” of Plato that can only be found in the World of Ideas.

            Rationality

               Lastly, philosophizing is marked with rationality.  As mentioned above, it’s a mental activity, specifically reflection.  Basically, its root and ground is in man’s claim that he is rational.  Philosophical explanation, then, is devoid of myths and religious beliefs, or is not based on a generally accepted knowledge nor based on authority.  Richard Rorty, an American philosopher, rejects the idea of truth as “mirroring” of what is believed as external objective reality.  With this idea of truth as “mirroring,” the act of philosophizing is deadened since one has to follow the generally accepted definition of truth. 

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