The answer always comes back: 'The point of philosophy is to ask questions, not to give answers.' I can't help but think 'No.
The scholar Julia Annas has written that the Forms do not bring certainty but clarity as to the point of philosophy: "If Forms are seeing what is good, rather than reasoning which any smart person might do but still be bad, then belief in the Forms does not bring certainty but one sees the right point of philosophy".
With other founding professors including academic heavyweights Richard Dawkins and Linda Colley, here's a look at just some of the great courses on offer to New College's first-year students: Philosophy for Fun and Profit What is the point of philosophy?
The fact that you might give one set of answers rather than another to standard philosophical questions will say nothing about how you will behave when something other than a point of philosophy is in dispute.
It's interesting that Montaigne began his work by reminding us that the point of philosophy was to teach us how to die, but would later edge towards the notion and quality of living instead.
Perhaps not to exam level – indeed, part of the point of philosophy is that it makes exams somewhat redundant – but it should be taught to children each day, from an early age.
The answer, Reinhold thought, is obvious: the first principle and systematic starting point of philosophy must be self-evident.
As Russell put the point, "the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it" (PLA, 193).
"The point of philosophy," he said, "is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it" (1918, 53).
I will leave it for others to decipher the finer points of this philosophy (spun off from Plato's "Symposium" and incorporating Adam and Eve and Greek mythology), which is originally dished out to Hedwig as a child's bedtime tale.
