To say that philosophy is dead is to be dead to philosophy Gita 18.22

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can philosophy ever be dead an eminent scientist recently in a book mentioned that philosophy is dead because it has not kept up with the sciences, Stephen Hawking in his book grand design whose hypothesis is that the grandness of the design is that it has no designer he dismissed philosophy by arguing that philosophy has not kept up with the science so it has become useless philosophers around the world even academic philosophers who study primarily as a profession and not as a passion were also appalled by this high handed dismissal of their vocation and that dismissal reflected the attitude the overbearing attitude of some scientists in what they imagined to be the jurisdiction of their area of study a military general may have won a great war for the country but that does not make the military general immediately expert on how to manage the state how to treat sick people how to create the best policies for employing people and certainly not for treating people with complicated diseases for which doctors have trained for years so this attitude success in one field qualifies one to be an expert who pronounces judgement in all fields is a sign of hubris such hubris is destructive for the person and for those who believe in that person such hubris leads to people not giving jurisdiction due jurisdiction to that which merits the jurisdiction so for example science is a field and philosophy is another field of course those who study serious spiritual literature often have issues with the way philosophy is studied in the academic departments in today’s world because it is not often a dispassionate search for the truth or even a passionate search for the truth it is more a passionate search for power prestige position it is just another materialistic endeavor wherein one doesn’t recognize that the purpose of philosophy is to acquaint us with the reality that is beyond the material level of reality the reality that is transcendental the reality that exists at a strata higher than the material a reality that we need to familiarize ourselves with if we want to fulfill the deepest aspirations of the human heart we all long to love and be loved and this longing cannot be fulfilled if we restrict love to the material realm if we equate love with its mundane expressions if we deny but are forced to confront the reality that love will be thwarted and frustrated by time and ultimately by the separation caused by death so philosophy which means so force is truth feeling is love so love of truth is meant to help us look unflinchingly and unsentimentality for the truth beyond the phenomena that we see in this world those phenomena actually refer to the surface of reality what we see with our senses deals with the surface of reality but beyond what is at the surface of reality is the substance and that substance is what we all aspire for the debate between thinkers about the nature of sense perception and the nature of reality has gone on for time immemorial in both the east and the west in the west in Greek thought Socrates is often depicted or his student Plato is often depicted as pointing his finger upwards he would stress on a higher realm which he considered to be the foundation of reality Aristotle the student who differed from him in many ways in his thoughts on the other hand points to the ground saying that the world that we see here and now that should be the basis for our search for reality so what we start from is important because it determines what is the reference point for gaining knowledge at the same time what we start from is not as important as what we are starting towards philosophy aims to know and achieve life’s ultimate truth and for that purpose it can start from various ways whether it starts from the empirical level and then moves to deeper truths or whether it starts from deeper truths and comes to the empirical level in trying to understand the correlation between the world that we see and the world that we can’t see it’s paradoxical that even science which prides itself on its empiricism which prides itself on not accepting unverifiable, unprovable hypothesis that science also requires the postulation of realms of existence