Accidental Blogger

A few years ago on a plane, my husband and I got into polite chit-chat with a fellow passenger. The talk turned to children. The lady asked what our kids were up to with their lives. Our daughter was at the time a graduate student in philosophy. Instead of providing that simple bit of information, my husband said rather grandly, "My daughter is a philosopher." The woman retorted laconically, "Aren't we all?" My husband, I am sure, was properly chastised for his pomposity.

What is philosophy? Who is a philosopher? What do philosophers do?  All tricky questions, in my opinion.  Answering them can be a bit like the "Not this, not this"  approach to describing God / Brahman in Hindu philosophy . Our own Sujatha was interrogated by her young daughter along the same lines recently and came up short.

"What is a Filo- so-fer?" M enunciated carefully.

"What?"

 "Here it says that Muskrat was a…" and she showed me the book page.

"A philosopher. Umm, I think that's a person who ponders hard-to-answer questions, like 'What is the purpose of life?' "

 "Or, how did the Big Bang start the universe", M tried to grapple with this new term.

 "No, that's a scientific question. A scientist can do experiments to try and find the answers to such questions. That can't be done in philosophy."

"Or, how did God create Man?"

"No, that's a theological question, not a philosophical one."

 "Or why are we Hindus instead of some other religion?"

"Not exactly", I was starting to run out of adjectives that could be easily explained (cultural? social? ethnic?). "Though it is possible that people of different religions may develop their own philosophies."

M gave up trying to get a coherent answer from me and went back to her book and the whimsies of Moomintroll and Muskrat.

Original post at Fluff 'n' Stuff.