Article
What is Philosophy? What Did I Actually Study and Why?
What is philosophy? After studying it, my answer stays surprisingly simple: it is the love of wisdom, exactly as the original Greek word suggests. In practice it is the patient, rational pursuit of understanding the world, the human being, and the relationship between them.
I will never forget my grandmother’s reaction when I told her I was pursuing philosophy for my master’s degree. She was bewildered, even disappointed. To her, philosophy seemed impractical, pointless. But to me, it made perfect sense. In an ever-changing world where fields of study rise and fall, philosophy stood out to me as something that had endured through the ages. It offered a timeless perspective.
When choosing a field that has stood the test of time, the options narrow: mathematics, physics, and philosophy. I have always admired certain aspects of mathematics and physics, concepts like the weak law of large numbers or the law of conservation of energy can profoundly shift one’s worldview. Yet, what transformed my perspective on life the most were certain branches of philosophy, distilled into the best philosophy books I have read.
What is philosophy, really?
The first lesson of philosophy is its own complexity. After thousands of years, humanity has yet to agree on its exact definition or boundaries. Is it the broad, rational exploration of the world, humanity, and their relationship, as seen in antiquity? Or is it the meticulous, language-focused analysis characteristic of 20th-century philosophy? For the sake of readability, I will simplify: philosophy is the love of wisdom.
The question of what philosophy is might be an excellent starting point for a newcomer to the field. However, I have reached a point where debating its definition feels less important. Philosophy, derived from Greek, translates to “love of wisdom.” Perhaps that is the only definition it truly needs.
The journey of philosophy begins with an emotion
So, why study something with such ambiguous boundaries? Why devote myself to a discipline even its practitioners cannot define? The answer lies in curiosity, a curiosity sparked by reading works like Gorgias (Γοργίας) and The Defence of Socrates (Ἀπολογία Σωκράτους). If those texts awaken something in you, as they did in me, there is no turning back. The opinions of others fade in the face of a lifelong pursuit of understanding, the pursuit that I have come to see as the meaning of life itself. For me, that pursuit led most deeply into phenomenology, the branch of philosophy I went on to study for years.
Summary
Common questions on this article's topic
What is philosophy?
What are the main branches of philosophy?
What is the Socratic method?
Is philosophy practical or purely academic?
Why has philosophy endured for thousands of years?
Why study philosophy?
If you have any thoughts, questions, or feedback, feel free to drop me a message at mail@richardgolian.com.
LinkedIn
Related articles
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher who fundamentally influenced several philosophical disciplines and also several academic fields. He did so through the way he thought about being and about human existence, and through the methods and procedures he used while doing it. He is also a controversial figure in history.
It was Thursday, 31 March 2022, when I handed over the last of my responsibilities to my colleagues, closed my laptop and went to the library. I left my job for several months and immersed myself in philosophy. And I am immensely grateful for it. Today I am, like most people, on a merry-go-round, and it is hard for me to stop and think about the fundamental questions of my own life.
If I have learned anything from this experience, it is that my life is not driven by something predefined.
More articles
The development of artificial intelligence changes how we look at which paths in life make sense. Which studies and which profession to choose.
It was September 2023. My life, my work, everything was completely different from now. It was simpler. I owned almost nothing. I needed to film an advert, I went up to a floor inside the company where the product I needed for that advert was, and there I noticed her for the first time. She laughs at me when I describe it like this, but at that moment the universe told me, that is her.
How and why I am gradually leaving social media and the big platforms. When I read that Meta is testing a new way to charge for organic posts that link outside its platform, it confirms how right I was to become steadily less dependent on the big platforms and on social media. It does not mean I have left them completely. It means that whether or not I stay in touch with my readers depends on them less and less, and today almost not at all.
One of my family members described a firm that has its data in several different tools, and its employees still join it by hand, in spreadsheets. That is the ordinary state of firms. When somebody tells such people not to do it by hand and to use AI, they will not understand. Most firms do not even have the basic connectors between the tools they use. These firms need help with AI transformation.
The same task, two models. Fable 5 against Opus 4.8. On paper Fable is the better model, with a larger context and stronger specs. And still it lost. Opus handled the task with a single round of checking for 721,000 tokens, while Fable needed nine rounds and burnt through 2.78 million tokens. The difference was not in the model, but in how I set the task. And I know it, because I measured it.
A few weeks ago I installed a small local AI model on my laptop that watches a live camera feed. I turned the webcam on in the dark, and in near total darkness it recognised me and the objects in the room. That such things exist, I have known for a long time. What opened my eyes was the accessibility. I installed it in one prompt, free, and it runs entirely on my machine, sending data nowhere.
I once wrote about building my own privacy-friendly analytics tool. It had bot detection from the first version, yet it was not enough. Direct visits took a strangely high share of my traffic. When someone claims that 20% of their visits are bots and 80% are humans, I used to think the same. Today I would say the opposite ratio is closer to the truth. This is how I got there.
I have Heidegger and my notebook beside me. I am asking where all of this is heading, where artificial intelligence is taking us.
Seventy per cent. That is where the first AI output begins, even when you give it the full company context and the best examples from the past. We are talking about the kind of output that cannot be defined programmatically. It is more complex. Often it is creative work. On one repeated type of output I reached eighty per cent within a week. Every further percentage point is harder than the one before.
Four days in Catalonia. No computer, no AI, almost no social media. I bought this notebook so that I could write down what I would think about, and what I would come across and learn on the trip.