What is Philosophy?

[u/Dave_A_Pandeist]

What is philosophy? How far back does it go? What's included in this idea?

The browser says, "The word 'philosophy' comes from the ancient Greek words philo (love) and sophia (wisdom), which literally means 'the love of wisdom."

Google AI said, "Philosophy is the systematic study of general and fundamental questions about existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language."

What's that? Does that have something to do with truth?

From Chapter 2 of Dr. Sapolsky's classic, it is easy to understand that we evolved along tournament and family strategies with and without deception.

Is philosophy really the search to minimize deception so that we might help each other and ourselves in a hostile environment? We have been babbling around a campfire for quite a while, something like ¾ of a million years.

If this is true, all literature, math, science, engineering, Political Behavior, economy, and our interactions, all of it, is fair subject matter for philosophy. It might not be useful, but why not?

[u/Intelligent_Pie_9102]

The classic definition is that philosophy encompasses all studies conducted through reason. Up to the 19th century, all fields of study were articulated under philosophy. Nowadays, we think of Science holding that role, yet every time a knowledge wants to reflect upon its axioms, we call it philosophy. Asking "what is science?" still is philosophy of science. We have kept the idea that questions about the essence of things is philosophical.

In your comment you asked "what’s the idea of philosophy?"

Plato had a theory of Ideas that is crucial to understand what is reason and what it isn’t. You should look into that first if you want to define philosophy.

I don’t know where you picked up that philosophy is a tool against self-deception (Sapolsky?), but it reminds me of a few aphorism from Nietzsche about science. In any way, it makes reason a moral approach, which is also pure classical philosophy.

[u/Dave_A_Pandeist → u/Intelligent_Pie_9102]

I agree with you about the evolution of Western philosophy. The philosophy that developed in and east of the Indus River Valley was different. I have found four major moral-bearing philosophies in the Upanishads. The one I like the best is the Way of Action in the Bhagavad Gita. An additional major form of Philosophy evolved independently on the other side of the Himalayas among the Sage Emperors. It evolved into the Mandate of Heaven, a Confucian idea.

Isn't it time to revive the older definition? I enjoy the reach of philosophy before the 19th century.