What is philosophy, and who counts as a philosopher? My two favorite answers come from Alvin Plantinga and Arthur Schopenhauer. According to Plantinga, philosophy is just thinking hard about something. Schopenhauer put it a bit more loftily: philosophy represents our attempt to “lay bare the true nature of the world.” (At least, this is true in philosophy’s more ambitious moments.) Additionally, I would submit that philosophy is the intensification of a natural human activity.
