“Philosophy is 99 percent about critical reflection on anything you care to be interested in.”
~ Richard Bradley
“While certainly true, popularizing definitions in this vein and reducing philosophy to rational, yet aimless thinking mischaracterizes and endangers its value. This is like defining a tree by one of its branches, or calling both a twig and an oak “pieces of wood”. While technically correct, something essential is lost in translation”.
“To return philosophy from its languishing reputation to its seat at the helm of our lives, reinvigorating the enquiry into how to live offers promise; engaging in a first-principles approach to charting life’s ever-present uncertainties, informed by today’s unprecedented repository of knowledge”.
One’s ability to think about life in no small measure depends on the environment in which the body lives. The analogy about the tree and not seeing the tree in its environment, so that we have context, to reflect on the bigger picture, rather than engage in mental masturbation.
The tree needs to be seen where it lives and breathes, the physical environment, does it get adequate rain and sunshine or is it chopped down and used as firewood. In other words the connection with the internet of things.
Unless one is literate, and not Pavlov’s dog, and has time, freed from the daily grind of economic subsistence and or survival on a daily basis and understand economic systems, historical and cultural impediments, studying philosophy is tantamount to living in a vacuum. In this sense your article to put philosophy back at the helm (of what)is a discussion in an echo chamber.
At the end of your article you quote Bertrand Russell; “Philosophy is to be studied…above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.” ~ Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
My preferred quote is;
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. Karl Marx Theses on Feuerback
David Gibson