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Articles

Be Your Own Person – Be a Philosopher

Continuing our occasional series of personal interpretations of philosophy, C.H. Goodwin extols the philosophical life.

The immediate reaction of some sharp, informed readers with a particular philosophical background to the heading of this article will be a denial of any necessary, logical relationship between becoming an autonomous person and being a philosopher. They will say philosophy is concerned with the meaning of meaning, and not with providing a framework of beliefs and values by which to live. As one professional philosopher has put it, “Philosophy… is above all concerned with the clarification of the concepts and propositions through which our experience and activities are intelligible…philosophy is not a speculative super-science that tries to answer questions about some ultimate reality; it is not the pursuit of moral knowledge; it is not the integrator of all human understanding into a unified view of man, God and the universe…”;

The heading of this article, however, is based upon the popular understanding of the word ‘philosophy’ as indicating a person’s basic attitudes towards life in general. W.F.

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