Philosophy is a hobby. No. It is a way of life.

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I maintain that philosophy is a way of life. It is a way of thinking. And without it, thinking is riddled with mistakes. Mistaken thinking makes life difficult.

Philosophy is a thought process to be used in every part of your life. Thought is used constantly. Hobbies are occasional.

Please consider changing the subtitle of this category because Philosophy is NOT a hobby.

There are different philosophies. They can't all be the same way of thinking.

ruveyn

Given the amount of discomfort PPR can give to religionists, I find it kinda ironic that religion is the only subject from the title not eviscerated in the forum description. Kinda seems unfair the way PPR's description places religion up high, as some sort of cosmically significant thing, while philosophical reflection is degraded as "useless". As much as there are serious problems in academic philosophy, it's a hell've a lot more useful than theology.

All knowledge is created by *guesses* and *criticism*. It is a process of trial and error, not one of deriving, induction, abduction, justification or empiricism (which is the old philosophies).

Knowledge also addresses problems. Problems aren't necessarily a bad thing but would include any question one has, or anything one wants to get and isn't sure how to get it.

Step one is to identify a problem. Just find anything that one thinks could be better in any way.

In step two, brainstorm ideas which might solve the problem; make guesses. There's no quality standards here, no rules or limitations, anything goes. And don't worry about coming up with enough ideas right away, you'll have unlimited chances to revisit this step later, so just move on as soon as you want.

Step three is to criticize the ideas. If anything at all is wrong with them, that's grounds for criticism. A criticism is an explanation of a flaw in an idea, and we want to be merciless here and find every flaw we can.

Step four is to do a mix of the previous steps in no particular order. You can have a lot of things in progress at once and bounce around between them, or you can be more methodical, either way is fine. Every time you criticize an idea, you have created a new problem: how could that idea be improved not to have the flaw criticized? And you've also created a new idea (the criticism itself) which can be exposed to criticism. So step three naturally feeds back into steps one and three.

So, criticism drives the process. Criticism identifies new problems we can try to solve, must be criticized itself in case it's mistaken, and sends us back to brainstorming as ideas are rejected. Criticism is the reason the initial steps are relaxed and easy: if any mistakes are made, they are supposed to be caught in the criticism step, you don't have to worry about them in the first steps.

The goal is to come up with a single idea which has no criticisms of it which you think will solve the problem best. When you reach that point, you're done. Everything you learned along the way, and this final result, are knowledge you have created.

There's also the possibility of criticizing the problem one is trying to solve, itself. Problems can have flaws too. Maybe there is a better way to frame the issue, or a better goal to try to accomplish instead. If a problem is criticized, one can try to brainstorm better problems or ways to improve it.

I maintain that philosophy is a way of life. It is a way of thinking. And without it, thinking is riddled with mistakes. Mistaken thinking makes life difficult.

Philosophy is a thought process to be used in every part of your life. Thought is used constantly. Hobbies are occasional.

Please consider changing the subtitle of this category because Philosophy is NOT a hobby.

I think it's supposed to be a joke.

I realize that. But the joke has side effects. Although the sides effects might be negligible. Philosophy has been effectively erased from education. And the only way to bring it back, is to show people that it is not useless. This joke reinforces the misnomer that philosophy is only an academic subject that can never be applied in real life.

This is my stance. Does anyone have a criticism?

Yup

Philosophy still exists in the school system. It's simply not the philosophy you want.

Philosophy is the purest form of mental masturbation, and it was created by lazy Athenian citizens so they would have something else to do besides physically masturbate or molest slave children. Even Aristotle proved detrimental- this thought experiments that he was to lazy to try proved bad for science for a couple millennia. He should have shut his piehole (or continued stuffing it) and left the science experiments to someone willing to get off their ass!

Philosophy is the purest form of mental masturbation, and it was created by lazy Athenian citizens so they would have something else to do besides physically masturbate or molest slave children. Even Aristotle proved detrimental- this thought experiments that he was to lazy to try proved bad for science for a couple millennia. He should have shut his piehole (or continued stuffing it) and left the science experiments to someone willing to get off their ass!