Part of a series of posts of a transcription of a conversation between Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens contains a distinction between philosophy and religion:
H: Then you end up where Simon Blackburn — a professor of philosophy at Cambridge, author of a very good recent study of Plato. He puts it: religion is fossilized philosophy, it’s philosophy with the questioning left out. It’s something that becomes instated and no longer subjected to any further philosophical inquiry. Well, why would that be, from any point of view, a desirable thing?
A: No, because philosophy doesn’t help you live.
H: It’s the only thing that helps one live.
Hitchens’s highlighting of three main questions in philosophy:
philosophy’s three main reflections or questions are 1) why are we here , 2) what would be justice? and 3) what, if we can answer those two questions, would be a just city or just republic? One can be a philosopher and maintain that those are imponderables…
MonkeyMoonMachine 