{"id":40,"date":"2021-11-05T10:46:48","date_gmt":"2021-11-05T14:46:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/humanities\/?page_id=40"},"modified":"2022-07-15T16:33:42","modified_gmt":"2022-07-15T20:33:42","slug":"philosophy-40-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/humanities\/philosophy-40-2\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Philosophy?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Philosophy asks about our foundations as human beings. These foundations are the most basic elements of conscious life. They are the most basic questions we can ask and the most basic answers we can give: \u201cWhat is \u2018good?’\u201d \u201cWhat is a \u2018color?’\u201d \u201cWhy do we speak?\u201d \u201cWhat is \u2018speaking?’\u201d \u201cWhat is \u2018society,\u2019 or \u2018politics?’\u201d \u201cWhat does it mean that there is \u2018sex,\u2019 or \u2018sexual orientation?’\u201d \u201cWhy do I exist?\u201d \u201cWhat\u2019s the point of the stars, of myself, of everything?\u201d All of our thinking, all of what we are as conscious beings, depends on these most basic questions and their answers. (Science depends on them too \u2014 and we have to ask, \u201cdoes science really answer any of these questions: does it rather only give a small part of the answer?\u201d)<\/p>\n

Because these questions and their answers are the basic elements of what we are as human beings, the effort to ask and try to answer these questions does much more than it initially seems. In asking and trying to answer, philosophy is immediately and directly activating and making grow what we ourselves in fact are. Further, since part of being human is to be with others in a world, and our basic ideas shape our sense of and attitudes towards\u00a0others and the world,\u00a0philosophy is also the direct growth of our relations with other people and with the world around and in us.<\/p>\n

Because all of our usual, familiar thinking depends on these basic questions and answers, philosophy has to dig far down into and through our familiar thinking to get to them. As a result these most simple questions call for the deepest, most challenging reasoning we can give for our answers. We try to teach this kind of thinking, with the aim of living most fully as human beings.<\/p>\n

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Philosophy asks about our foundations as human beings. These foundations are the most basic elements of conscious life. They are the most basic questions we can ask and the most basic answers we can give: \u201cWhat is \u2018good?’\u201d \u201cWhat is a \u2018color?’\u201d \u201cWhy do we speak?\u201d \u201cWhat is \u2018speaking?’\u201d \u201cWhat is \u2018society,\u2019 or \u2018politics?’\u201d \u201cWhat<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":900,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-40","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/900"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":421,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40\/revisions\/421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}