notes from Will & Ariel Durant on the meaning of philosophy:

Something momentous happens when a society turns from priestcraft as the source of all wisdom, which devolves into interpreting, not the facts of nature but, sacred texts and the words of the oracle.

"For what is philosophy but an art? - one more attempt to give form to the chaos of experience… Art is the creation of beauty; the expression of thought or feeling in a form, beautiful or sublime."

Confucius: "I seek unity, all-pervading"; the search for unity in all phenomena! i.e. a theory of everything. Is this not the work of philosophy?

"Philosophy itself, which had once summoned all sciences to its aid in making a coherent image of the world … found its task of coordination too stupendous for its courage … and hid itself in recondite and narrow lanes, timidly secure from the issues and responsibilities of life. Human knowledge had become too great for the human mind. All that remained was the scientific specialist, who knew 'more and more about
less and less,' and the [philosopher] who knew less and less about more and more… The gap between life and knowledge grew wider and wider."

"scholastic philosophy … a disguised theology"

Hermann Graf Keyserling (1880 – 1946), a German philosopher. (Believed that German militarism was dead and that Germany's only hope lay in the adoption of international, democratic principles.) "Philosophy is the completion of science in the synthesis of wisdom. The parts of philosophy are important branches of science. But it was an unmitigated evil that [as a result of this fractionalization] the sense for the living synthesis should have disappeared."

"wisdom is not wise if it scares away merriment [because] a sense of humor, born of perspective, bears a near kinship to philosophy; each is the soul of the other."

"Epistemology … the study of the knowledge-process [better viewed as a] science of psychology [rather than] philosophy [which is] the synthetic interpretation of all experience rather than the analytic description of the mode and process of experience itself. Analysis belongs to science and gives us knowledge; philosophy must provide a synthesis for wisdom."

"There is a pleasure in philosophy - [felt against the backdrop of] the coarse necessities of physical existence [which] drag [one] from the heights of thought into the mart economic strife and gain. Most of us have known some golden days in the June of life when philosophy was in fact what Plato calls it, 'that dear delight'; when the love of a modestly elusive Truth seemed more glorious, incomparibly, than the lust for the ways of the flesh and the dross of the world… 'Life has meaning,' we feel with Browning - 'to find its meaning is my meat and drink.' So much of our lives is meaningless, a self-cancelling vacillation and futility; we
strive with the chaos about us and within; but we would believe all the while that there is something vital and significant in us, could we but decipher our own souls. We want to understand; 'life means for us
constantly to transform into light and flame all that we are or meet with (Nietzsche)'; … we want to sieze the value and perspective of passing things, and so to pull ourselves up out of the maelstom of daily
circumstance… we want to see things now as they will seem forever - 'in the light of eternity.' … we want to be whole [not fearing death] … 'To be a philosopher,' said Thoreau, 'is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.' We can be sure that if we can but find wisdom all things will [yet] be added unto us. 'Seek ye first the good things of the mind,' Bacon admonishes us, 'and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.' Truth [may] not make us rich, but it will make us free."

"Is philosophy stagnant? Science seems always to advance, while philosophy seems always to lose ground… Yet this is only because philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous task of dealing with problems not yet open to the methods of science… Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises as hypothesis and flows into achievement... philosophy is a hypothetical interpretation of the unknown… it is the front trench of the seige of truth. Science is the captured territory; and behind it are those secure regions [of knowledge]… philosophy seems to stand still, perplexed; but only because she leaves the fruits of victory to her daughter the sciences, and herself passes on, divinely discontent, to the uncertain and unexplored… Science [does not] inquire into the values and ideal possibilities of things, nor into their total and final significance; it is content to show their present actuality and operation, it narrows its gaze resolutely to the nature and process of things as they are… But [philosophy] is not content to describe the fact [but] to ascertain its relation to experience in general, and thereby to get at its meaning and its worth… to combine things in interpretive synthesis … to put together, better than before, that great universe-watch which the inquisitive scientist has taken apart… Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair."

(a) logic: the study of ideal method in thought and research
(b) esthetics: the study of ideal form or beauty; it is the ph of art
(c) ethics: the study of ideal conduct
(d) politics: the study of ideal social organization
(e) metaphysics: unlike the other forms of philosophy, it does not seek to coordinate the real in light of the ideal; it is the study of ultimate reality: 1) ontology and 2) epistemology

These are the parts of philosophy, but so dismembered it loses its beauty and joy. "Great men speak to us only so far as we have ears and souls to hear them; only so far as we have in us the roots of that which
flowers in them. We too have had the experiences they had, but we did not suck those experiences dry of their secret and subtle meanings; we were not sensitive to the overtones of the reality that hummed about us.
Genius hears the overtones, and the music of the spheres; genius knows what Pythagoras meant when he said that philosophy is the highest music."

David Hume: "philosophy is common sense, methodized and corrected"

Kant and Hume: earlier philosophers had tried to understand the world outside of human behavior, that, it made sense on its own; only by understanding human beings can we understand the world; what we
think of as an 'objective' world is merely that seen through human eyes; humanity is condemed to see the world from its own perspective, there is no other viewpoint to guide it; after Hume and Kant, it was seen that the structure of knowledge comes from within mankind and not an external ideal or source; we are part of what we know and detached spectators of what is known;

on Seneca: "philosophy is the science of wisdom and wisdom is the art of living. Happiness is the goal but virtue, not pleasure, is the road."

Why doesn't God relieve suffering for mankind? 

The following is channeled information from the other side, received during WWII, via the mediumship of Winifred Willard, reported in “From The Seventh Plane, Inter-World Messages” (1946):

If God can [relieve suffering] for mankind, why doesn’t He do it? Why doesn’t He take control of man’s life at all times, regardless of anything else? Why doesn’t He tell the human how to go and what to do from day to day? Why doesn’t He thus avert so many tragedies and prevent so much wreckage?

It would seem on first thought that the argument is right. Countless men have asked the questions and resented what they called the indifference of God to human suffering. They ask by the millions, why God did not prevent this terrible holocaust. Why did God permit this nation or that, to go wrong; these people to mire themselves in the mud of beastliness? Why does God permit epidemics to go rampant through communities? Why does He take ones so dearly loved? Why does He not sit at the helm and guide all peoples everywhere to safe port on the other side of life?

Do you really think you'd like being treated like an animal in a cage, or a robot without sentience?

The answer is simple in its fundamentals. In His Infinite wisdom and power, God could do all these things. But instead He has given man the right of free will, to make his own choices, to be good and do right, or to be evil and go wrong. He has given nations the same right to their choices. If a nation determines to lower the moral standards and luxuriate in crime and sensuality, that nation is free to do just that. If it prefers to have government of the people, it may. If it elects autocracy and concentration of power, it may follow that path to the logical end. If it becomes a warring nation, lusting on human blood and reaching out in aggrandizement toward ever more power, that nation may go as far as its resources permit.

class is in session

God never takes the reins and makes the human follow where He drives. Infinitely higher is His gift to mankind, the gift of free will. With the gift, He places upon nations and individuals the responsibility of exercising this freedom of will and of choice and then taking the consequences of choice. It could not be otherwise. If nations or local governments permit conditions which breed disease, those nations must pay the price of the working of the law.

suffering is not a required course for graduation, it's just that most people will learn the hard way or not at all

If nations or men forget their highest selves and live on lower levels than are clean and pure and God-like, they may. For they are free agents. But they reap what they sow. The law thus laid down, is never abrogated. The nation which wars for selfish ends and through greed of selfish power, will perish by the sword and be its own undoing.

When things go well, we smugly take full credit; when things go wrong, we egocentrically blame God. It's a "heads I win, tails you lose" proposition.

God does not send war; nor pestilence; nor tragedy; nor sickness; nor any other hard thing. But He has put into the hands of the children of men the freedom of will that enables them to direct their choices and thus to reap their own harvests of goodness and righteousness and peace and joy—or the reverse.

God’s law … knows no difference between high estate and low. It is an impersonal law which is one of God’s greatest gifts to humankind. It makes it possible for the human to hold himself in pride and with conscious greatness as he makes his way through the world, knowing that he is not slave or servant of any, not even of God; but that he is permitted the glorious right to choose for himself…

'Why has this happened to me?' 'Are you not part of the human race which has luxuriated in the short-term benefits of selfishness?'

Does this mean, people will ask, that the individual upon whom trouble descends like a blighting cloud, has done some wrong and is being punished by an angry God? Could it mean that? No! It does not mean that. But the law does not operate with each individual as an isolated case, independent of the group with which he lives and works. It meshes into the community, the nation, the world in which each one finds himself… This law of the universe could not isolate each individual and deal with him through the years as a separate entity…

laissez-faire management style

... it is the out-working of man’s choosing and not of God’s will that the earth has turned red with shed blood because there are those who know no limits of greed for wicked power.

Editor's last word:

I very much like Thoreau's simple definition of what it means to be a philosopher. It's what I'd like to do, how I'd like to live, for the unending future. 

We learn from the afterlife testimonies that in the next world we do not suddenly become omniscient with all mysteries unraveled. The citizens of Father Benson’s world employ both science and philosophy to advance Summerland-society in the struggle for knowledge. There as here, philosophy is the advance-guard offering its uncertain theories and hypotheses, with science as the captured territory of empirically-tested information. It’s a long and difficult road, this mapping of reality. It was meant to be – for in this process we evolve ourselves as human beings and claim more of that inner potential “without discernible upper limit.”