What is Philosophy?

What is philosophy exactly? I’ve been interested in all questions and thoughts and perceptions and understandings for a long time now. I think I have some good ideas but I’ve always brought myself up to be modest. What do I know? Why would I ever think my questions haven’t already been asked a thousand times over thousands of years? Why would my words deserve immortality? My thoughts? If my questions themselves are worthy of the title of “philosophic”, does it matter that my prose is hopelessly adolescent? I’m no Socrates or Demosthenes. It seems the philosophers of old had such beautiful ways with words.

The past several years I’ve become more secluded, mentally and physically, but my questions about life are now equally critical of myself and the world around me, and I can’t trust a single answer I give. I know nothing. Might as well change my surname to Snow. Is it still philosophy if even I am unsure of the credibility of my words? Or is that perhaps required? I consider myself a man of science, but that offers me no help - philosophy is everything excluding science. I’m on an island in a pitch black cavern casting stones and hoping that I’m hitting something too far away to hear a reply from. I’ll never know if I hit anything.

Maybe everything I think is fundamentally fallacious in some way. Maybe something is wrong with my brain in which I simply can’t comprehend something essential. Maybe I’m actually in a coma. Maybe the Matrix is real. Maybe I’m on something similar to The Truman Show. Maybe I’m really a cylon. Maybe I’m the dream of a God. Does “I think, therefore I am.” really apply? I don’t think it does. It’s a syllogism in which both premises are indeterminate, and therefore the conclusion is unknown. The word “thinking” has semantic issues and the assumption that anything that thinks must “be” isn’t necessarily fact. Regardless, the conclusion is uncertain. I have not a single definite truth to hold on to. Not a single torch is lit in my cavern. Can anything, then, be certain? Is it possible to be justifiably unwavering on any position concerning existence? How vague must I be to say I know one truth? “The entity I perceive as ‘me’ thinks it is thinking using it’s own definition for the worth ‘think’, therefore, it must be something.” 4/27/16 continued:

“I think, therefore I am.” is incorrect. Since I can’t tell you what I do know, I’ll focus on what I don’t. I guess there is one thing that I could, in fact, claim to know without doubt. That is that I don’t know. That I’m ignorant of that answer. “The entity I refer to as ‘me’ is not aware of things.” Doesn’t sound as nice, but I think it’s an improvement, logically. Perhaps it’s a self-defeating or fallacious argument in some way, but I can’t think of a better way to word it. I don’t know what I don’t know, except that I don’t know. This is the one absolute answer I have. Every other thing I’ve ever said in my existence is technically unprovable, and even if my unproven answers turn out to be correct, can I really call it ‘knowledge’ if I believe it without unimpeachable proof or for the wrong reasons? Is a guess considered knowledge?

I suppose one could argue that I know absolutely that I think I’m Brent Wiseman or that I know that I think any other thing that I think, by the definitions we think those words hold. Seems a bit cheap, but I guess I’d concede that for truth.

#philosophy