Philosophy is the lighthouse that lead the ship of humanity into the bay that sparkled evolution and civilisation. It is a landmark where daily survival started to be more or less taken for granted, and in that safety humanity could stop, look around at the nature and society around, explore past and future, ask questions, and became aware of its self-consciousness and that of the world around and beyond what meets the eye. Philosophy was born as the first stepping stone of another human journey, this time an endless one, the journey to knowledge. That is exactly what philosophy means – the love for knowledge, and since it is an act of love it also produced its offspring, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology etc, basically all that we know and study today has its roots in an ancient time when we started to ask questions and wonder.
And that is the purpose why today we are celebrating the World Philosophy Day, to celebrate the moment when we realised that there is more to just travel, gather, hunt and harvest, to consider ourselves a species and to discover, realise and create our relation to each other and to nature.
Today is the day we cherish because slowly, through the mists of time and history, humanity starts to identify the answers to those primordial questions and, fortunately, for each discovered answer come along ten more questions, because knowledge is a never ending quest that journeys between the shores of learning and teaching with the unique purpose of moving forward together improving our lives and those of others.
Through philosophy we have gained our knowledge, our ethics and morality, our sense of belonging, relations to others and feeling of being part of something larger than just the cycle of birth-life-death, in other words, Life. Therefore, lets rediscover the roads that brought us to these accomplishments from a faraway past, aiming at a better future.
L.Nava