What Is Philosophy
by:Dr. Keith Allen Korcz
So, you've decided to take a philosophy class. What is philosophy like? Well, there's good news and there's better news. The good news is, it's probably not what you expect. We'll see why that's good news in a second. The better news is it's a lot more worthwhile than you've probably been led to believe.
If you're like most people, you've never studied philosophy before, yet you've heard all kinds of claims about what philosophy is. When many people talk about philosophy, they often have in mind a philosophy of life, a kind of recipe for happiness and fulfillment. This is what people like Deepak Chopra and Shirley McClain seem to have in mind when they talk about philosophy. Other people think of philosophy as involving a kind of mystical knowing, sometimes resulting from contemplating riddles without answers, such as "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Sometimes people think of philosophy as involving anything occult, as in "New Age Philosophy". Finally, and probably as a result of the above popular accounts of philosophy, many people think of 'philosophy' as little more than a name for bullshit, talk involving nothing more than expressions of personal opinions made to seem more profound than they really are.
If some of these popular accounts of philosophy were correct, then "bullshit" would be an apt name for philosophy, and few sensible people would waste their time with it. But in fact philosophy, as studied in universities, is completely different from what these accounts would suggest.
تار و پود هستیم بر باد رفت،اما نرفت