The Philosophy of Everything: On the Pursuit of Happiness — Part I: On Epistemology

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Before anything else, before the world and before the question of how to live in it, I had to know what I could trust.

This was the first thing I had to figure out. What did "true" mean. How could I tell a true thing from a story told well. What were my eyes and ears actually doing when I thought I was seeing and hearing. Where did the things I called knowledge come from, and how could I tell which routes to it were trustworthy and which were not. How far could reason actually take me, and at what point did it run out.

Philosophers have a long word for this work. They call it epistemology. The word sounds difficult. The work itself is not. Epistemology is the work of asking how you know what you think you know. It has to come first, because everything after it rests on it. What the world is, what the mind is, how to live among other people: all of it rests on what counts as knowing in the first place. If the foundation is rotten, every floor above it is rotten too.

I think every person should do this work. Not as a philosopher. As a person who would rather not spend a life believing things for no good reason.

Philosophy is not supposed to put spells on people. It is supposed to teach them to ask. And the urge to flourish, the one underneath every choice any of us makes, has to follow the truth and nothing else.

Next in the series: Chapter 1: Truth.