Think for a minute (28.11.2025)

World Philosophy Day

UNESCO’s World Philosophy Day has been going since 2005, yet few people know about it. You won’t find any discount offers online or ‘happy philosophy day’ cards to send to your friends. In a world full of problems, we can wonder why anyone should take notice.

I’ll try to provide an answer.

Let’s take the idea of stopping a moment to think about thinking.  In our fast moving, slightly crazy world, this is a subversive idea. Instead of social feeds, Instagram reels, podcasts and algorithms, we are being asked to slow down; to forget the mental confetti thrown at us all day long and remember that we are intelligent beings.

Philosophy is like the ‘thinking admin’ of a civilization. It is where the structures of belief are questioned, dissected and then reformulated.  It wonders at the nature of knowledge and the evidence we bring to support its truth claims. For example, are we sure our culture is correct in how it understands justice and the good life? Do we know what constitutes a person? And should we be dividing up the world according to different categories? Philosophy reminds us that the claims we make about the nature of reality might be wrong.

This type of thinking is ‘slow thinking’. It is also disciplined. Today, we seem to be caught in endless wrestling matches. We don’t argue so much as bombard each other with flashes of opinions that get scattered over social media. We present these opinions as truths, but we don’t analyse them; we just demand that others accept them.

Yet philosophy speaks to us and says, ‘are you sure that’s a good argument? Are you sure you not falling for persuasive packaging?’ It asks us to be wary of the person who appeals to our emotions and silences our ability to think.

In other words, philosophy asks us to slow down. It reminds us that we might be wrong. It invites us to analyse and not prescribe; to make distinctions and not judgements; to ask, ‘what follows from this if it is true?

This is why, in the end, philosophy is a practical discipline as well as an intellectual one. It’s not so much about ‘Stoicism’s ten top tips for successful living’, as a call to dig beneath the surface of things. It helps us identify whether we’re anxious because we’ve misunderstood freedom, or whether we’re feeling stuck because we’ve misconstrued the nature of identity. In the end, most stress is a concept-error in disguise. Do you have to be productive all the time? Do you always have to fit in? Remember, our feelings are often theories about life which we’ve learnt early on and never examined.  That’s why philosophy is like good mental hygiene; ever so often we need a clean-out.

And it’s not necessarily hard, despite what people say.  Most of us are doing it without realizing it. When you say, ‘this isn’t fair’ or ‘that doesn’t feel just’, you are doing ethics. When you care about what counts as evidence and truth, you are doing epistemology. When you wonder how society could work better, you are doing political philosophy.

So why not give it a go right now? Take a belief you hold dearly and test its validity. First, identify the evidence that supports it and then consider the evidence that counts against it. Check that you haven’t made any assumptions (this is always the hardest part) and then sit back and weigh the evidence against each other. Does your belief still hold? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, are you brave enough to get rid of it?

I’ll give you an example. I used to believe there was an essential part of my nature that never changed, call it my soul or my essence.  One day (after reading David Hume), I tried to find it and realized that I couldn’t. Beyond genetics, I failed to identify what held the same over time, from when I was a baby to who I am now. This led to an internal struggle because I had invested much of my emotional life in the belief that I had a soul; in the end, however, I had to concede. How has this impacted my thoughts about life after death? Greatly. I understand it in a different way now.

My point then is this: if you can interrogate your beliefs, then you can better engage with the world. We can’t always feel our way through things; sometimes we have to think our way through them instead.