哲学的功用

1.寻求生命的意义

the love of a modestly elusive Truth seemed more glorious, incomparably, 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"; we are "one of those who don't want millions, but an answer to their questions"; we want to seize the value and perspective of passing things, and so to pull ourselves up out of the maelstrom of daily circumstance. 

We want to know that the little things are little, and the big things big, before it is too late.

2.协调内心的平衡

We want to see things now as they will seem forever—"in the light of eternity." 

We want to learn to laugh in the face of the inevitable, to smile even at the looming of death. 

We want to be whole, to coördinate our energies by criticizing and harmonizing our desires; for coördinated energy is the last word in ethics and politics, and perhaps in logic and metaphysics too. 

"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 may be sure that if we can but find wisdom, all things else will be added unto us. 

Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free.

3.哲学对科学的作用

相对科技的飞速发展，哲学貌似静止不前，甚至在倒退，但哲学解决的是科技解决不了的问题：

Yet this is only because philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous task of dealing with problems not yet open to the methods of science—problems like good and evil, beauty and ugliness, order and freedom, life and death; so soon as a field of inquiry yields knowledge susceptible of exact formulation it is called science. 

哲学是科技之源：

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement. 

哲学是追寻真理的先头兵：

Philosophy is a hypothetical interpretation of the unknown (as in metaphysics), or of the inexactly known (as in ethics or political philosophy); it is the front trench in the siege of truth. 

Science is the captured territory; and behind it are those secure regions in which knowledge and art build our imperfect and marvelous world. 

哲学成果留给科学，然后继续探索未知：

Philosophy seems to stand still, perplexed; but only because she leaves the fruits of victory to her daughters the sciences, and herself passes on, divinely discontent, to the uncertain and unexplored. 

4.哲学与科学的关系

1）科学重在分解，哲学重在合成

Science is analytical description, philosophy is synthetic interpretation. 

Science wishes to resolve the whole into parts, the organism into organs, the obscure into the known. 

2）科学重事实，哲学重事物之间的联系

But the philosopher is not content to describe the fact; he wishes to ascertain its relation to experience in general, and thereby to get at its meaning and its worth; he combines things in interpretive synthesis; he tries to put together, better than before, that great universe-watch which the inquisitive scientist has analytically taken apart. 

3）科学告诉我们怎么做，而哲学告诉我们什么时候做

Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom—desire coordinated in the light of all experience—can tell us when to heal and when to kill. 

4）科学给我们知识，但哲学给我们智慧

Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

5.哲学构成

Specifically, philosophy means and includes five fields of study and discourse: logic, esthetics, ethics, politics, and metaphysics. 

Logic is the study of ideal method in thought and research: observation and introspection, deduction and induction, hypothesis and experiment, analysis and synthesis—such are the forms of human activity which logic tries to understand and guide; it is a dull study for most of us, and yet the great events in the history of thought are the improvements men have made in their methods of thinking and research. 

Esthetics is the study of ideal form, or beauty; it is the philosophy of art. 

Ethics is the study of ideal conduct; the highest knowledge, said Socrates, is the knowledge of good and evil, the knowledge of the wisdom of life. 

Politics is the study of ideal social organization (it is not, as one might suppose, the art and science of capturing and keeping office); monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, socialism, anarchism, feminism—these are the dramatis personae of political philosophy. 

metaphysics is the study of the "ultimate reality" of all things: of the real and final nature of "matter" (ontology), of "mind" (philosophical psychology), and of the interrelation of "mind" and "matter" in the processes of perception and knowledge (epistemology). 

ontology，本体论

epistemology，认知论

These are the parts of philosophy; but so dismembered it loses its beauty and its joy. 

6.如何学哲学

We shall seek it not in its shrivelled abstractness and formality, but clothed in the living form of genius; 

we shall study not merely philosophies, but philosophers; 

we shall spend our time with the saints and martyrs of thought, letting their radiant spirit play about us until perhaps we too, in some measure, shall partake of what Leonardo called "the noblest pleasure, the joy of understanding."

Well, surely we may take this attitude to the master minds of history without hurt to our pride! 

"Do you then be reasonable," said old Socrates to Crito, "and do not mind whether the teachers of philosophy are good or bad, but think only of Philosophy herself. 

Try to examine her well and truly; and if she be evil, seek to turn away all men from her; but if she be what I believe she is, then follow her and serve her, and be of good cheer."