If I want to find out how a chick is in bed. Am I searching for truth?
Is that philosophy?
Was Colubus a philosopher?
Or Richard Byrd?
I want to say YES, but I don’t think that would be the spirit of the thing. Philosophy is exactly not about physically discovering things, it’s about exploring with the mind.
So, NO, but with reservation.
I would not say that curiosity in essence is philosophy. Curiosity is what created and drove thought to become philosophical. Philosophy is the attempt of getting your “beliefs” right. It is an attempt to align oneself to reality. You critically examine everything around you to gain a true understanding of reality and the world around you. Philosophy therefore is the search for truth.
I cannot agree. If I go to NBA.com to look up Ben Wallace’s rebounding statistics, I am indeed engaged in a ‘search for truth’ yet I am not engaging in philosophy. Likewise, the answer to Dave’s first question - whether sleeping with a woman to determine if she’s good in bed is a search for truth - is Yes, and yet this is also not ‘philosophy’.
The question here is inherently the distinction between science and philosophy. The pure search for ‘knowledge’, ‘facts’ and ‘truth’ is science; philosophy is more the act of interpreting this data. For example, to examine what it means for Dave that this women is good in bed, how such knowldege effects his reality, etc.: that’s philosophy.
David,
Philosophy: impersonal anxiety, refuge among anemic ideas.
Emile Michel-Cioran
Daybreak,
You are right. Philosophy it not simply the attempt to find truth, though that is part of its job. It is an attempt to “understand” who and what we are. An attempt to “understand” how reality affects our being. Thank you for waking me up 
In discussions like this over what term X really means, I am always tempted to just say it doesn’t matter, there is no right answer, and it’s silly to get wrapped up in the superficial symantics of it. Yet here I am, getting wrapped up anyway.
You can define philosophy as curiosity, or searching for true facts, or whatever, in which case it becomes rather a useless word for lack of structure; you cast so wide a net with it, it functions as little more than a new synonym for curiosity or whatever. Or you can define philosophy as something a bit obtuse like “impersonal anxiety, refuge among anemic ideas”, but then you risk making it useless for the opposite reason of making it so specific that a lot of stuff most people consider philosophy is left out and left nameless (or if other names can be applied to all that other stuff, maybe we don’t need the term philosophy in the first place).
At some point, I think we have to go on a vague, generalized, non-formal understanding of the term as it is used by a majority of those who use it, and just get used to the fact that people will disagree on what it means or what counts as philosophy. Whoopie, nothing new there – language is not a formal system, so it’s silly to expect it to behave like one.
I am, at least to some extent, with you on this one.
For each word we each have what it means to us.
When we engage in dialogue we will either assume the other person takes it to mean the same thing, or we will assume they take it to mean what we are aware is a more general definition. But dialogue at it’s best (and more Socratic) will attempt to explore the other person’s interpretations and create some kind of common terminology for the particular ways in which each person delineates the concepts, while also challenging the underlying assumptions of those delineations.
Ofcourse, this normally doesn’t happen, because when it comes right down to it people have very little give and take with the way they use their terminologies. Not for any reason that they think a word more superbly fitting, but simply because they have an emotional penchant for the word being used in that manner.
Avoid like the plague those who will use a dictionary to back up their arguments.
isn’t it something like a love of ideas. i think the analogy w/ sexual curiosity is very apt, becos i think displaced sexual curiosity is at the root of much exploration. i think the relationship between science & philosophy is similar to the relationship between pornography & erotica. one is focused on effectiveness, the other on beauty.
What is love?
To conquer or be conquered.
And in that I think we have two brands of philosopher.
cute. i have to say, its more fun being conquered, but sometimes the waiting is a drag…