The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has declared that World Philosophy Day should be celebrated on the third Thursday of November, or 21 November this year.
The Thammasat University Library collection includes many books about different aspects of philosophy.
TU students may know that the word philosophy derives from ancient Greek terms meaning the love of wisdom.
In modern times, philosophy usually refers to questions about life, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. What do philosophers do? They ask questions, talk about things, discuss and even argue sometimes, and present their findings in an organized way.
Among subjects that were once considered part of philosophy but are now independent fields of study are psychology, sociology, linguistics, and economics.
The UN website states:
By celebrating World Philosophy Day each year, on the third Thursday of November, UNESCO underlines the enduring value of philosophy for the development of human thought, for each culture and for each individual.
Philosophy is an inspiring discipline as well as an everyday practice that can transform societies.
By enabling to discover the diversity of the intellectual currents in the world, philosophy stimulates intercultural dialogue.
By awakening minds to the exercise of thinking and the reasoned confrontation of opinions, philosophy helps to build a more tolerant, more respectful society. It thus helps to understand and respond to major contemporary challenges by creating the intellectual conditions for change.
On this Day of collective exercise in free, reasoned and informed thinking on the major challenges of our time, all of UNESCO’s partners are encouraged to organize various types of activities – philosophical dialogues, debates, conferences, workshops, cultural events and presentations around the general theme of the Day, with the participation of philosophers and scientists from all branches of natural and social sciences, educators, teachers, students, press journalists and other mass media representatives, and the general public.
Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, has declared on the occasion of World Philosophy Day:
On World Philosophy Day, UNESCO invites us to celebrate the diversity of human thought and to take a philosophical look at the world.
Philosophy is not only a thousand-year-old science, nourished by traditions from all over the world; it is a living exercise in questioning and conceiving the world, not only as it is, but also as it could or should be.
In order to build a better world, to move towards an ideal of peace, we know that we must adopt a philosophical approach – namely, we must question the flaws of our world, beyond the tumult of crises.
Philosophy is therefore essential when it comes to defining the ethical principles that should guide humanity, as UNESCO did years ago with the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights and, more recently, with the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, adopted by our 193 Member States at the last General Conference.
It is just as irreplaceable if we want to sustainably rebuild our relationship with living beings, confronted with the urgency of climate change and the collapse of biodiversity – whether with Bruno Latour, who passed away last month and who reminded us of the interdependence of humans and the planet, or with Achille Mbembe, who calls upon us to reflect on the fundamental vulnerability of humans.
In view of the magnitude of contemporary challenges, it is indeed our very conception of humanity that must be reexamined, in order to reflect upon “the human of the future”, in accordance with the theme of this year’s World Philosophy Day.
This reflection must be open. Open to all eyes, first of all, by measuring in particular, in this International Decade of Indigenous Languages, how indigenous philosophies can change the way we look at the world, as well as our way of living in it.
Open, also, to all types of knowledge, particularly to other human sciences, in order to grasp the world in all its complexity and to be able to translate reflection into action.
Open, finally, to our societies, because the science of philosophy is not isolated from the world; it is not the mere prerogative of scholars in their ivory towers. Everyone must have the tools of philosophy to reinvent a common world, and from the youngest age. This is also the purpose of World Philosophy Day.
On this Day, UNESCO calls upon all of our societies to take a moment to step back and think collectively about the future of humanity, and to conceive a better world.
Here are some thoughts on philosophy by authors, most of whom are represented in the TU Library collection:
Philosophy … consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
- Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
As solid citizens, philosophers ally themselves in practice with the powers they condemn in theory.
- Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
The philosopher as an analyst is not concerned with the physical properties of things, but only with the way in which we speak about them.
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- A. J. Ayer in Language, Truth, and Logic (1936)
Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)
The philosopher wants to know things as they are. He loves the truth. That is an intellectual virtue. He does not love to tell the truth. That is a moral virtue. Presumably he would prefer not to practice deception; but if it is a condition of his survival, he has no objection to it. The hopes of changing mankind almost always end up in changing not mankind but one’s thought.
- Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988)
The history of philosophy has always been the agent of power in philosophy, and even in thought. It has played the represser’s role: how can you think without having read Plato, Descartes, Kant and Heidegger, and so-and-so’s book about them? A formidable school of intimidation which manufactures specialists in thought—but which also makes those who stay outside conform all the more to this specialism which they despise. An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking.
- Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues II (2002)
The beginning of philosophy is a consciousness of your own weakness and inability in necessary things.
- Epictetus, Discourses
Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.
- James Anthony Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects
Philosophy always buries its undertakers.
- Étienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (1937)
Philosophy is that which grasps its own era in thought.
- Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Rights (1821)
The Greek word for philosopher (philosophos) connotes a distinction from sophos. It signifies the lover of wisdom (knowledge) as distinguished from him who considers himself wise in the possession of knowledge. This meaning of the word still endures: the essence of philosophy is not the possession of the truth but the search for truth. … Philosophy means to be on the way. Its questions are more essential than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question.
- Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom (1951)
If it does not upset, it is not philosophy.
- Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic (1963)
(all images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)