The easiest answer to the question: “what is philosophy?” is that philosophy is whatever philosophers call philosophy. Although correct, that would not be helpful. Academic philosophy actually is a process. It consists of four steps:
- Learn about a topic (most of the time through reading).
- Think about the topic and form your own opinion.
- Discuss the topic with other people to test how well founded your opinion is.
- Write your opinion down, so that other people can use it when they are learning about this topic.
What I would love, is for this website to be a platform for step 3: discussion. So please, if you have any questions, remarks or want to discuss topics, please do. There are discussion forms everywhere.