I thought it would be interesting to make a post today before class concerning thoughts of what philosophy is, and then make a post after our discussion over the same subject in order to compare the thought processes before and after. And so I will.
At the beginning of the year, we had a similar discussion. As I recall, we began by dissecting the word philosophy into two parts: love and wisdom (more specifically, a love OF wisdom). I then suggested that we take a closer look at the word “wisdom,” since we all have a fairly clear definition of what we meant as “love.” In our first class, I believe we came to a definition of wisdom roughly resembling “knowledge gained by active experience” (“active” experience meaning that one must actually perform an action or go through a process of experience rather than simply reading a text or being taught by rote). So by that way of thinking we can say that philosophy is a love of gaining knowledge by experiencing things firsthand, and a philosopher is one who loves such a thing. Now, this does not mean that a philosopher loves experiencing things firsthand. This would pertain to a love of something else other than wisdom. Rather, they love gaining knowledge, and the way they must gain knowledge in order for it to be called wisdom is to gain it by firsthand experience. In the same train of thought, a philosopher does not love knowledge, but loves learning. By learning, they do in fact gain knowledge, but that is not what they love.
I will write a new post in response to this one after our discussion today.
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