What comes to your mind when you encounter the word Philippine History?
Answers
Human beings have the unique ability to engage in long range planning. Consequently, we can either work on providing ourselves the best answer to the question, "How should I live my life," or we can ignore the question.
"Philosophy", a word coined by Socrates or Plato, was intended by them to mean the loving pursuit of genuine wisdom. In other words, Philosophy is the systematic search for the best answer to the question, "How should I live my life" undertaken with the passion that arises when one understands that a good answer to this question is the cornerstone of a well lived life: a good life.
Understood in this way, a person engaged in Philosophy experiences it in a way that is similar to the joy of eating a highly nutritious and delicious meal. Thanks to the variety of issues, it is a joy that never grows old.
It is also like the joy of designing and building a wonderful home. This home being designed is the one called "mind". It is the home we spend our entire lives in.
It is a joy that is not only artistic, and intellectual, but also social, because it turns out that good answers to the question, "How should I live my life" are fully entertained with good answers to the question, "How should we live our lives together."
A philosophical life is any life in which the systematic pursuit of good answers to these questions has risen to a place of prominence.
At the heart of the philosophical life is a paradox. To systematically pursue our two leading questions, we need to answer the question, "How should we understand the word "should"? It would seem that we must already have the answer to the question in order to develop an answer it. But, that would seem to mean that any answer would be tainted by errors in our pre-existing assumptions about what "should" should mean.
The resolution of this paradox is to be found in what has been called "dialectic". Our idea of "should" is not frozen. It develops. We are creators designing the basic terms of our life (like our idea of "should") based on situations we have been given. Included in those situations are prior understandings of "should". Those prior understandings do not imprison us, but guide us toward better, even more useful, understandings.
Thus, the idea "should" has a history. We have been creatively negotiating with each other about it from the dawn of history, and we have succeeded in developing a more useful concept. One proof of our success can be found in the extraordinary reduction in violence that has occurred during human history which has been documented by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of our Nature.
Philosophy is not properly understood as a limited enterprise or academic discipline. It is an all encompassing way of organizing life through an at least partially reflective project of planning how to make our human lives better. It draws on all of the academic disciplines, not only the one we call "Philosophy".