Philosophy is explorering wondering questioning and learning. And yet there is many personal definitions of the word. I love and hate philosophy. It makes me question explore myself my knowledge my thoughts and the way others think as well. Philosophy covers a lots of other definitions as well. I would state philosophy is the first original discipline...wondering and thinking. Thoughts please. pljamesone@att.net

That you love and hate philosophy, first I would like to say, shows the range of thought you have given to your definition of the very thing that is most loved in your life. This shows, to me, that you have a full grasp on the situation. For while philosophy is the love of wisdom, it turns passions to hate with it's intencity and exploration of thought. That we suffer continuously in the reality we exist in; that we as human beings are promised misery and confusion at one point or another in our life, even that we find one day that it is our purpose to suffer, will cause a hate in us directed at frist to the mother of this type of thinking. This mother is philosophy, the very cause of learning and counseling. It is for this reason that so many have philisophical phobias and obsessions, philosophy is something done at first with love or hate. As philosophy brings on sufering physically, mentaly, and that strange other worldly suffering of the soul(a quality it produces and yet offers the only cure for), are the reasons philosophy is both hated and loved by the true philosophers.

I say that it is our purpose to suffer. Which I could describe in detail if need be. But as this discussion is about what philosophy is, I woud say I agree with you that philosophy is the original discipline as all learning spawns from a love of wisdom; wisdom being a quality most often gained from learning.
So it seems to me that next what should be looked at, to find if this definition of philosophy is a correct thing to believe in our pursute of knowledge, is why would philosophy be the original discipline? To begin, Is philosophy something for humans only? Created by them? Used only by them?

It is true all can learn from philosophy and all disciplines. With the multiplexities of different thoughts how doe one thinker learn? To search and define that thought he is searching for? Thoughts please. pljamesone@att.net