Philosophy is not the archaeology of ideas

Yesterday, a good friend of mine assessed that the difference between another one of my friends who happens to be a neuroscience major and myself was that he was creative in his intelligence and was set out to discover and synthesize while I, on the hand, was merely interested in the old ideas of other men, as if my own personality played no role in my study of philosophy. I replied to him, "I am not an archaeologist", and the conversation quickly moved to other places without giving me much of a chance to elaborate on exactly what I meant.

Yes, I do read a lot of books written by men who have long passed on from this ephemeral world. This does not mean I do not have original thought. It does mean that I believe that men 1000 years ago had to deal with many of the exact same existential and philosophical issues that we do today. I also acknowledge my own limitations as one man by looking to others much wiser and experienced than I. By reading the authors of antiquity and of Christendom, I enter into the great conversation which has helped constitute the peak of culture in our civilization.

Philosophy, while definitely engaging the discursive intellect, is not primarily a mental exercise. It is a way of approaching the world around us. To be a philosopher means to constantly live in wonder at the beauty and mystery that constantly encompasses us, and to try to make sense of it all in the face of our own finitude--death. If one forgets that philosophy is concerned with real life and gets lost as a catalogist of ideas, then one is no longer a lover of wisdom but merely a sophist.