Why Philosophy?

Sometimes people ask me why it is I decided to study philosophy. I always have a hard time coming up with an acceptable answer, but I think I may have stumbled upon something.

In most subjects that you’ll learn in school, there are correct answers. You can grind your way over a set of math problems and then check the answers in the back to see if you got them right. You can agonize for hours over chemistry homework, and then go look up the correct answers when you’re done.

With philosophy, there are no right answers. It’s funny, because this is exactly why I didn’t like philosophy when I first took the intro course. It seemed dumb to study anything that has no right answers. Later on I began to realize that it’s actually more interesting to study things that have no right answers, and part of it has to do with all the time thinking that you may be coming up with the right answers yourself.

That’s part of the mystique. You learn about all of these great thinkers who could never figure out the right answers and somehow it’s motivating to think that I may be the one to come out with something new, something revolutionary, something that may someday be viewed as “right.”

It’s the whole (crazy) line of thinking that, even though no one to date has come up with the “right” answer, someday I can.

And that, probably more than anything else, is why I study philosophy.