What is Philosophy?

 "What is philosophy?"   This was the topic of a Philosophy Bites podcast I listened to today while cycling on the stationary bike.   Lots of different answers, including mere splutters of laughter on occasion.   Besides the splutters, I think I liked the ones best that talked about philosophy as dealing with the things that (so far) can't be answered by empirical studies.    That is one of my New Thoughts of 2013, that the borders tend to shift.   Questions that were once philosophical, like "what is the irreducible smallest particle of matter?" are now scientific.

I thought while listening that if asked (and here defending my amateur status to the utmost) I would say philosophy widens circles in both directions.  An answer is always a closure; philosophy opens up the loop again.  However, now that I am writing it I realize this is rather a functional definition; still, no more off-center than some of the others I heard.   And I like the visual of the circles, like ripples outward from a stone thrown in a pond, or like the water funneling down a drain.

It struck me also while listening that philosophy will never, never go away (temporally speaking), no matter how much is known empirically.    From philosophy comes the questions that the natural sciences try to answer; and the only real interest in the answers  is philosophical (or, OK, maybe practical, but still).   Quantification is of no interest except as it evokes significance of some kind. ... where not directly practical, then philosophical.

Or so it would seem; I will have to check the idea against reality when I read science-related material in future.

The Philosophy Bites podcasts are good listening; and I've found other philosophy podcasts as well.  I started off looking for particular topics on my Podcast App-- Heidegger, Sartre, Plotinus -- and then became fond of certain stations and started to listen to other topics that seemed interesting.   This is how I motivate myself to exercise in the morning.     What is Philosophy?  Rambling through the Sierra National Forest listening to British voices discussing moral relativism or Sartre's idea of Bad Faith.    It makes me wish I had more than about another quarter century ahead of me at best.