What philosophy is:

"Philos," a Greek word meaning, "To love," is an emotion, a passion, and an ambition. "Sophia," ironically, is the quality of being wise, or the ability to make correct judgements based on information from our environment, our experience, and our accurate thought. Philosophy, therefore, is a passion to be wise.

Organizing the philosophy:

Wisdom comes from a foundation of skepticism. Though skepticism is a philosophical stance in itself, the root of skepticism comes from observing contradiction. Competing views, ideas, and faiths breed questions that ask, "Which of these competing views is correct?"

In fact, wisdom would not exist if contradiction did not exist. We would immediately assume that our ideas are correct, and naively place faith in these ideas. Faith that they will correctly guide our relationships, whether they are with nature, or with other human beings. In philosophy, therefore, we start with asking questions.

To ask a question means we trust our thinking to 1) ask the question, and 2) find an answer. This assumption, a form of faith in itself, requires that we have faith in ourselves to comprehend the questions and the answers. Faith, a principle of trust, begins with its application towards our senses and our imagination. We trust that what we sense, and what we feel, is real. We trust that our minds can perceive it correctly, and be creative in applying solutions to our problems.

The parts of philosophy:

Our experience and thought have lead us to define (or organize) the basic elements of focus in philosophy:

1. Metaphysics. The metaphysics of philosophy is the study of first principles. This means examining what is objective, or independent, of ourselves. It is also a challenge to whether it may be subjective instead. What is the Cosmos? How are we part of it?
2. Epistemology. What is knowledge? How is it founded? How do we know something in the first place?
3. Logic. How does one determine between valid and invalid reasoning? How does one determine that the knowledge we have is correct?
4. Ethics. What are the correct principles of human action? What is a good act vs. a bad one? Are there degrees of good and bad?
5. Aesthetics. What is beauty, and why is it beautiful?

We are then caught in a quandary: faith and skepticism battle for the right to be right, one dependent on the other. We abandon faith as it shows to be wrong at times, and then in applying skepticism, we realize we have made an assumption, and have been exercising faith all along. We then realize that nothing can be known, because there will always be contradictions.

We are finally led in the frustration of our confusion to balancing skepticism and faith for the sake of practicality. We fight to apply skepticism and faith in the right places. We think, therefore we know we exist. We observe, and therefore attempt to relate ourselves to our observations. We recognize our reliance upon our thought, and upon our observations. In faith we realize that we are limited to thought and observation.

We then realize the importance of our philosophy, and therefore organize it into something workable, and when we work we continue to realize our existence. Therefore, we live and wish to continue living, and we finally realize that we love to live wisely, and smile that philosophy has guided us there.

--David Evans