Why philosophy? The question I keep asking myself since I knew we were going to have it as a subject this semester. Why do we learn philosophy if we're not going to use it? A lot of students ask themselves the same question: why philosophy? Honestly, I don't like philosophy at all. It consists almost on reading and I don't like to read, but when I read the introduction and the first chapter of Fernando Savater's book, The Questions of Life, I started to gain some interest in philosophy and to understand a little bit more about it."I only know that I know nothing". I think that Socrates is trying to say that we don't stop learning new things. When we learn something, we discover something else and so on. We are always generating new thoughts and we never stop asking ourselves more questions and we don't stop until we find them.
Maybe you think that science has the explanation for everything and that it has a specific way to solve things, but philosophy will help us to discover how to do things our own way and not like others say. Philosophy makes us think deeper and not only in the surface.
Fernando Savater's book, The Questions of Life, has captured my attention about philosophy with his first topic, death. It's something that we don't think that will happen, but sooner or later, it will. He tries to tell us that we don't have to be afraid of something that someday WILL happen, we cannot escape from death.
Writing about this and reading the book makes me think that maybe philosophy class is not a bad idea at all.
Yes, I suppose everyone shares the same question: "Why Philosophy?"
ResponderEliminarLet me take a wild guess. We're taking into consideration Philosophy this semester because most students are lacking the ability to think a little more deeply,or how you say, not only on the surface about whatever it is that we call our life. We tend to just memorize things and not fully understand them.
Hopefully this book will help us understand the full meaning of a lot of things. Best of luck!
Philosophy as a class this semester is also something I thought about. I did think philosophy was important but in a personal level, not to have it as a class, not to mention a class 5 times a week. But I too after reading Savater's introduction put myself to question the importance of philosophy as a social base that people must share at a certain level.
ResponderEliminarSo as you, I've awoken an interest for this philosophy course and hope it is exciting and help us reflect about life and regular thoughts that we might percieve as common such as, death.
It is interesting that we have a philosophy class, but it would be more interesting to know the reason of having this philosophy class at this age, in this course, with the teacher we have, and all of that. We are now trying to find the sense of things that we have been taking for granted about 17-18 years. I had never asked myself these questions like I do now, thanks to this phylosophy class.
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