Philosophy What is Philosophy

 “What is Philosophy?”

According to the famous Greek philosopher Socrates, “The unexamined life is not worth living”. But what does he mean by this? He means that we should look and think through life deeper. Examination of life is more than just a use of common sense. Hard thinking is necessary even though it disturbs. With the use of Philosophy, we better understand things and answer the most important questions in existence. Philosophy, according to the famous Greek philosopher Aristotle, begins with wonder at the marvels and mysteries of the world. In other words, we started to question things around us because of our curiosity and our need to attain knowledge about things. Philosophy is the love of wisdom (etymologically from the Greek word philos, meaning “love”, and sophia, meaning “wisdom”). It means that we must have the initiative to pursue knowledge because we love to have it. Seeking the truth does not always mean triumph, success or satisfaction. Sometimes, giving up our received tradition and disturbing our common sense requires our intellectual and emotional strength for us to be able to grasp new ideas that would later on benefit us and free us from wrong notions, beliefs and ideas. We must not give up in philosophical inquiry and reserve ourselves for the pursuit of truth because truth will set us free from the darkness of ignorance. Philosophy is not always constant. We must learn to develop the sense of perceiving others’ viewpoints. Philosophy points out our every false perception in terms of what we believed in. But people react to philosophical inquiry in different ways — positively or negatively. In this way, Philosophy teaches us to argue. One of Philosophy’s tasks is to clarify concepts.