A cliché, unfortunately well anchored in our school curricula, is coming back into fashion: philosophy is the art of asking questions, of formulating “problems”, not that of providing answers.
Let's set the record straight.
All great philosophies of course address fundamental questions - that of truth (of knowledge), of justice and injustice (ethics and politics), of the criteria of beauty (aesthetics), and ultimately that of the good life and wisdom.
If they can be broken down into an infinite number of dissertation topics (a rhetoric that was not adopted by any great philosopher!), the fact remains that these are not the questions that Woody Allen mocked
(“
Where do we come from?” -us, where are we going… and what are we going to eat for lunch
?
”
), which are great, but obviously the answers.
The first of these appears in Greek myths before being secularized (and sometimes contested) in philosophy.
It is based on the idea that the world is not…
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