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Editorial

Step Out of My Sunlight!

by Anja Steinbauer

Looking back over the huge variety of themes explored in past issues of Philosophy Now, it strikes me once again that one of the many great things about philosophy is that you can philosophise about pretty much anything. The ancient Greek philosophers, particularly the Pre-Socratics, explored to the full the many possibilities of applying philosophical thought. It is remarkable that, in doing so, they often talked about aspects of everyday experience. The distance between ‘real life’ and abstract philosophical thought, that sometimes gives philosophy the popular reputation of being eccentric and strange was beginning to show, as becomes clear in The Clouds, Aristophanes’ satirical comedy about Socrates, but it was not yet dominant. This may be partly because the early philosophers were concerned not only with high order philosophical questions but also with real-world solutions to practical problems.

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