You should read [spoiler] because [spoiler]

We should all treat ourselves to the occasional stroll through the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

http://plato.stanford.edu/

It's an easy way to get at accessible yet reasonably thorough discussions of many matters important to those of us who rant here on the forum as if we have all the answers and know all there is to know. In truth, the best we can usually muster are rough and poor approximations served up with a great deal of faith or conviction. That's okay, it's human nature. We need approximations and forced certainty. But it's nice to be able to occasionally dig deeper into these questions that are so important to us, to see the centuries of thought that have gone into them, developing the problems without managing to lay everything to rest, and appreciate that there's always more to the story than we're compelled to believe (no matter what side we usually choose to take).

The less abridged story is richer and better. Sometimes it's more rewarding to approach life as a philosopher rather than as a politician, a cultist, a sports fan, etc :noob:

I enjoyed reading this take on philosophy:

Quote:

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If earlier thinkers had regarded philosophy as a scientia scientiarum, Berlin regarded it as a scientia nescientiarum, the form of enquiry concerning those things which cannot be objects of empirical knowledge.

In the case of non-philosophical questions, even if the answer is unknown, the means for discovering the answer is known, or accepted, by most people. Thus questions of empirical fact can be answered by observation. Other questions can be answered deductively, by referring to established rules; this is the case, for example, with mathematics, grammar and formal logic. For example, even if we do not know the solution to a particularly difficult mathematical problem, we do know the rules and techniques that would have to be employed to find the answer.

According to Berlin, philosophy concerns itself with questions such that not only are the answers not known, but neither are the means for arriving at an answer, or the standards of judgement by which to evaluate whether a suggested answer is plausible or implausible. Thus the questions ‘How long does it take to drive from x to y?’ or ‘What is the cube root of 729?’ are not philosophical; while ‘What is time?’ or ‘What is a number?’ are. ‘What is the purpose of human life?’ or ‘Are all men brothers?’ are philosophical questions, while ‘Do most of such-and-such a group of men think of one another as brothers?’ or ‘What did Luther believe was the purpose of life?’ are not.

Berlin related this view to Kant's distinction between matters of fact and those structures or categories in terms of which we make sense of facts. Philosophy, being concerned with questions that arise from people's attempts to make sense of their experiences, involves consideration of the concepts and categories through which experience is perceived, organised and explained.

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http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/#2.2

Let's not forget however that I'm right and you're wrong :downcast: