Philosophy is basically ‘infrastructure’ – a grounding guide to enable and improve the cognitive actions of your human being – how we understand the world around us and ourselves and others while we’re in it. There are certain cynics (although I’ve never met a real one) who deride philosophy as pointless vanity, an idle abstraction has no practical end; yet without it there would be no social progress, no developmental science, no art, economics or coming culture. So they might have a point… looking back and thinking ahead?
As abstainers and skeptics reject the significance of abstruse imperatives they’d do well to identify the problems being posed, as ALL philosophical propositions are answers to questions – find the question and you will understand the statement.

   Each stage of our development as a human being has a psychological root – the learning process is a series of logical conclusions reached by inductive and deductive reasoning. Walking to talking to reading and writing with the giant leap into personal puberty. Can all be seen as steps in establishing our individuality – this growth defined by a diminishing dependence upon our mothers. I can move away from you; I can explain myself; I can obtain information on my own; I can breed – are all analagous of dialectic propositions; from unconscious competence through to conscious competence and largely dependent upon the teacher.
As the words; doktor, rabbi, guru, prophet, mullah, master all originally meant: TEACHER. Maybe best explained by the cranky contrarian Socrates – refused to record his pedagogic dealings – dismissed professional philosophy tutors as pandering sophists; for whom winning the argument was more important than finding a TRUTH; brains for hire; the lowest of the low.

   One of the reasons your practising philosopher in modern times has a poor reputation can be blamed on a ludicrous legendary incident involving an eremetic Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Interviewed at his rural retreat by Parisian journalists the maudlin Master pranced about his bower overacting like a circus seal in his Kurdish kaftan and fur-trimmed cap with the pan posed gestures and dramatic declamations. The journos returned and rightly lampooned this bathetic bonehead – cartoonists’ renditions providing a template for tormented prophets ever thence. And when Nietzsche arrived with that bloody horse?

   Sometimes to hear the mere word, ‘philosophy’ can get your goat – when it's used as populous social prescription. Those Reader's Digest homespun homilies set to make you think? Apothegmic lifestyle lists of guiding principles dumbed right down to pointless pap; ‘Never explain, never apologise’ contributes nothing to the unexamined life. So don’t ask questions bigger than yourself; answer to your name; keep your bowels open and don’t eat yellow snow. They never seem to print: Desire, not satisfaction, is measured by price – as a TRUE observation of our withering world.

   One drawback to getting the gist of Logic is that it becomes very hard to converse in depth with anyone who doesn’t have the same understanding, has not reached an equal ontological level; you tend to sound arrogant, aggressive, indifferent when voicing your veto. It’s impossible to tell someone, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about’ and not sound like a cunt.