The contemporary French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, provocatively defined philosophy as “the art of creating concepts.” In many ways this definition accurately describes the current state of the discipline of philosophy. Philosophers create new ways of understanding, sometimes by helping us to see new aspects of life and reality that we could not see before, sometimes by intellectually destroying old explanations and thereby creating the opportunity to rebuild our understanding. You will find though that philosophers have seen philosophy as a fundamental inquiry into the basis and possibility of all forms of understanding, of every discipline in the sciences and humanities. Indeed, philosophy is an ancient discipline that continues as the parent discipline of our most ambitious intellectual endeavors ranging from religion to science. What marks the philosophical lineage is the desire to attain truth, whether this involves facts about existence or that which transcends the facts.

Philosophy literally means “the love of wisdom.” Wisdom implies something beyond knowledge. One can discover many things about people, the world, and the universe by studying them carefully (the arts and sciences), but until one delves with rigor, honesty, and acute critical facility into the meaning, significance, profundity, or lack of these, one will never have achieved anything of value. The facts will become encyclopedic, with no purpose and no direction. Reasons become taken for granted. Fortunately, this rarely happens since philosophy stands behind every human pursuit. It seems to be part of human nature to stop and ask, “Why are we doing this?” or “Shouldn’t we really be putting our efforts into something else? Why are we here anyway?” Having studied philosophy for many, many years I have little fear that our culture will become a cult of technology for technology’s sake, or that philosophy will become irrelevant to people’s lives because of mindless consumerism and entertainment. The great danger is that the philosophy that stands behind our activities goes unexamined and that it looses the philosophical spirit of radical inquiry, radical honesty. In order for wisdom to emerge, we must be willing to question the facts, the reasons for the facts, and the explanations, including the explanations we give ourselves about our personal behavior and lifestyles.