Friday, February 22, 2013

, a refusal to get totally caught up in the details of life and simply go along with the crowd. Philosophy and wisdom define our place in the universe and give our lives meaning.

"Philosophy, religion, and science have always been closely related. The emphasis shifts, but the point of these endeavors is the same: the importance of ideas and understanding, of making sense out of our world and seeing our lives in some larger even cosmic, perspective. Ideas define our place in the universe and our relations with other people: ideas determine what is important and what is not important, what is fair and what is not fair, what is worth believing and what is not worth believing. Ideas give life meaning. Our minds need ideas the way our bodies need food. We are starved for visions, hunger for understanding. We are caught up in the routines of life, distracted occasionally by those activities we call "recreation" and "entertainment." What we as a nation have lost is the joy of thinking, the challenge of understanding, the inspirations as well as the consolations of philosophy.

This is odd, however; for America, more than any other nation on earth, was founded on ideas, was built upon philosophical principles. Yet, how many educated Americans can even name a living American philosopher? Or, for that matter, how many of us know anything about the philosophical history that, toward th end of the eighteenth century, gave birth to this nation? We recite ideas that are two hundred, in some cases two thousand, years old without any attempt to understand them, without any awareness that many men and women have lived and died for them, without even trying to be critical about them, or to work them into our vision of the world. But these ideas are philosophy. Philosophy is simply thinking hard about life, about what we have leaned, about our pace in the world. Philosophy is, literally, the love of wisdom. It is the search for the larger picture, and this involves the demand for knowledge--the kind of knowledge that allows us to understand our lives and the world around us. It is, accordingly, the insistence on the importance of values, a refusal to get totally caught up in the details of life and simply go along with the crowd. Philosophy and wisdom define our place in the universe and give our lives meaning."

From the Preface of THE BIG QUESTIONS A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins.

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