The Aims of Philosophy
What is your aim in philosophy? – To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 309Some philosophers (e.g. existentialists, pragmatists) think philosophy is ultimately a practical discipline that should help us lead meaningful lives by showing us who we are, how we relate to the world around us and what we should do. Others (e.g. analytic philosophers) see philosophy as a technical, formal, and entirely theoretical discipline, with goals such as "the disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake". Other proposed goals of philosophy include "discover the absolutely fundamental reason of everything it investigates", "making explicit the nature and significance of ordinary and scientific beliefs", and unifying and transcending the insights given by science and religion. Others proposed that philosophy is a complex discipline because it has 4 or 6 different dimensions.
Read more about this topic: Metaphilosophy
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“The aims of life are the best defense against death.”
—Primo Levi (1919–1987)
“Why does philosophy use concepts and why does faith use symbols if both try to express the same ultimate? The answer, of course, is that the relation to the ultimate is not the same in each case. The philosophical relation is in principle a detached description of the basic structure in which the ultimate manifests itself. The relation of faith is in principle an involved expression of concern about the meaning of the ultimate for the faithful.”
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