PHILOSOPHY

                                            With philosophy everything is possible.

We have heard the word philosophy on so many occasions. Many people associate it with reasoning while others with a way of life. Some define it as rationality and actually synonymize it; that is, when one wants to refer to thinking, they say philosophizing or refer to philosophy as thinking. But, philosophy actually involves much more than thinking. It is love ‘Philo’ it is wisdom ‘Sophia’ as one would etymologically define it. It is the love of wisdom and so encompasses what love does and what wisdom is composed of. Wisdom is not something passive that a person simply possesses. Therefore, philosophy is a huge complex, and often controversial subject.

It is a way of life. It is a way someone sees life or approaches it. It guides someone’s way of approaching and viewing life. I am sure you have encountered people talking about something like “philosophy of life” referring to someone’s ways of doing things and how they often think. They are simply referring to the way one observes life and leads it. That is a philosophy of the way. There is the philosophy of science, the philosophy of nature, the philosophy of law, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of politics, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of Education, and several others. These disciplines, it is divided into; metaphysics (things in their reality), ethics (the question of how we ought to behave), epistemology (the study of knowledge), logic (the process of rationality), axiology (the problem of values), and aesthetics (the study of beauty).

We have questions that we have referred to as philosophical questions. These are questions that are guided by curiosity, criticality, and logic. They are often asking things that look obvious to the ordinary person but when thought about critically they tend to show us much more than we are accustomed to. For example, someone may interest him/herself in one of the five fundamental questions of humanity “Where do we come from?” and attempt to think deeply about it. To any ordinary person, there is not much need to ask such a question because we come from God and may even quickly dismiss it. Actually, some people deem some questions useless or none necessary and so ignore them but philosophy will attempt to answer them or pave the way for a clearer way of explaining them. There are so many philosophical questions about politics, religion, money, relationships, education, and many others. This makes philosophy a very wide topic. In fact, history has it that in ancient Greece, philosophy was composed of everything. For example, you would have a philosopher like Aristotle talk about health, astronomy, and so on, Plato talk about, the state (philosophy), and sociology, and even the pre-Socratic philosophers like Parmenides talk about ethics and the issue of Change. So, philosophy cannot be fixed to only thinking.

According to Callahan and Clark (1983 p88), philosophy is a systematic and logical examination of life to flame a system of general ideas by which the sum total of human experiences may be evaluated in such a manner as to make the world more understandable. One can, therefore, say that decisions in life must be based on logical analysis of the factors that affect it. Therefore beliefs traditions, taboos, common sense, and dogmas must not be accepted anyhow without being subjected to questioning. Philosophy can be regarded as a systematic search for answers to questions that affect all aspects of life. 

Notably, philosophy adds no new facts to the body of knowledge. However, it analyses the meaning and impact on the life of facts produced by other disciplines. In fact, philosophy has no conclusive reality but keeps asking questions. For example, how sure are you that you in particular will die? You will quickly answer “Of course I will die because others have died” but you have no conclusive evidence that you in particular will die. It is just a convention that most of us have agreed to because of so many examples in our eyes. Philosophy is like science, it keeps asking questions. The greatest enemy of philosophy and science is that one that keeps referring to them as the source of evidence. You will hear someone saying “Philosophically, that is the truth” or “Science dictates so” when actually these are neither science questions nor philosophical questions. In his encyclical Fides ET Ratio of 1998 paragraph five, Pope John Paul II rightly highlights the fact that philosophy does not end but rather has constant growth. To think of impossibility in philosophy is absurd. Just like Christians quote Luke’s words “With God everything is possible” In philosophy we also say “With philosophy nothing is impossible.”