"There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers." - William James
One thing that bugs me about philosophy is that there is never a straight forward answer. In every other class every question has had one definite answer and I have become accustomed to that. But in philosophy no matter how much we debate one theory another one by a different philosopher is just as plausible. This annoys me. I feel like we aren't getting anywhere. But at the sometime that's something I'm actually starting to like about philosophy. In a way it's nice to know that a question has a billion answers and not one is wrong.
But that's the whole point! Both the point of philosophy and of IB, but in different ways. The point of IB is to get you to think critically about a subject, and then make a stance on it, and defend it with the information you know. It's how strong your argument can be - a round-about way of also testing your knowledge on the subject. And it's the whole point of philosophy because, as you quoted, "Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it." Philosopher = "philo"-love of, + "soph"-wisdom. It's all about attaining this truth. But it's not the end destination, it's the journey, it's the human condition, it's about HOW we get there, it's the PROCESS.
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Sorry, I'm quite passionate about this stuff!
I completely agree with you, at least now I do, but at the beginning of the year I strongly felt like there should only be one answer to a question or else we aren't making any progress. It's just something I've always been used to because I only took AP classes and the only other IB class I'm taking is Design Tech and those classes are nothing like IB Philosophy. So I'm not used to looking at things more in depth and forming my own opinions, I've always had to search for that one right answer. But the more I'm in this class I'm starting to understand that it is all about the journey, as you mentioned, and it's nice not to have to find what "x" equals but be allowed to find my own way to what all the other letters in the alphabet mean.
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