Philosophy, the Love of Wisdom

My philosophy textbook spends a chapter exploring why God allows evil to exist, so I look forward to looking more into that later. In the meantime, I want to share what I learned about what the word philosophy means.

As vocabulary.com describes it, "The original meaning of the word philosophy comes from the Greek roots philo- meaning 'love' and -sophos, or 'wisdom.'" Thus, philosophy implies a love of wisdom, which is something we should all have. Wisdom is the ability to use the knowledge we have to help us make good decisions. Knowing the commandments is knowledge. Keeping the commandments we know is wisdom. Wisdom is a trait that each of us should try to develop.

I'm not sure if this is one of the main reasons I decided to take a philosophy class, but it certainly applies to me. I know that I need to gain more wisdom in order to become more like God, for more reasons than one, and I hope that studying philosophy will help me explore my thoughts and develop greater wisdom. I know that philosophy won't have all the answers I'm looking for, but it will give me tools that I can use to work with the knowledge I have and hopefully come to some wise conclusions that match up with church doctrine.

If nothing else, my philosophy class is certainly going to be interesting, both in that it will make me think and in that it will give me additional tools to help me examine my thoughts. Thankfully, I have enough wisdom to know to be wary of "the philosophies of men," so I'll take any contrary conclusions I find in this class with a grain of salt. If I come up with a "logical" conclusion that contradicts church doctrine, I'll take that as a sign that I should check my logic again. But hopefully, this class will help me find answers to some things that confuse me about the Gospel and help me gain the wisdom I need to more fully commit to living it.

I seek greater wisdom, and a wise man once taught that what we seek is determined by what we love. So it seems to make sense to me to seek wisdom by studying a subject that literally (ostensibly) was built on a foundation of the love of wisdom.