In the Beginning was the Blog

“Why?” and Other Intractable Questions

Last night was my first lecture in a Philosophy subject I’m studying this semester. I usually enjoy first lectures in a subject because it seems to be when the lecturer is fresh and keen to inspire the students to be interested in the topic so I get to invibe a little bit of passion from someone who has devoted more than a small part of their lives to a topic that I know next to nothing about.

In our introductory lesson last night we zoomed through some broad descriptions of Philosophy noting that it is ancient and classical, sometimes thought of as the Great Conversation, a thread of discourse going for centuries where the founders speak timelessly so that their arguments still resound today and where each one of us takes part bringing our own experience to the party. We skated over the diversity of the types of questions that Philosophy tries to deal with and noted how Philosophy is related to the “meta” of almost every other “logos” or discipline that ends in “logy”. We saw that the nature of Philosophy is to deal with questions that underlie everything yet are perhaps impossible to answer and we finished off touching on the concept of logic as a tool for reasoning and allowing Philosophers to think and argue around the great mysteries of existence.

I particularly enjoyed a discussion of the absurdity of asking “Why” i.e. the more we try to question our assumptions, the more we end up in a kind abstract soup which can also be humorous. We looked at an article illustrating this called The Toddler Philosopher: I’m only five ‘Why’s’ away from an ontological crisis where the author discusses how her toddler keeps asking “Why?” until she ends up having to explain the meaning of life to him after a simple question about what an ice scraper does.

When I used to blog on Bogosity I would fairly regularly ask myself big philosophical questions and then write about them as if I expected to be able to produce a neat answer in less than 500 words and two hours of thought. It took me three years to conclude what we learned in our lecture last night, that many of these questions can’t be easily and definitively answered, that we don’t have to have a crisis every time we’re confronted with something that challenges our world view but that we can learn an awful lot of useful stuff along the way if we’re brave enough to set out on the journey.

See also: The School of Athens a cool painting.

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