What is the goal of philosophy

[chaource]

When I was a student, I was told (in the mandatory philosophy course) that philosophy is a study of "the most general laws governing the universe". This was, of course, incorrect. What is philosophy, then

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[chaource]

Similarly, one can ask whether you are today the same person as 20 years ago, or a "different" person. I regard this question as ill-posed: there is no way to establish which answer is correct, for there is no clear definition of what it means to be "the same" person or "not the same". All cells in the human body are physically renewed every 7 years, except perhaps for the female reproductive cells that are not renewed. This much we can verify; but this is certainly not what the question is about.

Now, I agree that this question appears interesting and important, that the answer to this question has direct consequences for the personal motivation. So every person needs to come up with some kind of answer. What I am saying is that philosophical texts do not provide a satisfactory answer derived logically from "first principles". Imagine a long theoretical treatise "proving from first principles" that you become a different person whenever you wake up after sleeping; every day a different person wakes up, mistakenly remembering something that happened yesterday. Will you believe that? Now, let's consider the dogma of Buddhism where not only you are the same person as 20 years ago, but you are also the same person who died many years ago or even many centuries ago, because every soul is reborn into a new body after death. Buddhist philosophers "prove" this from "first principles". Will you believe that? Ultimately it is your own beliefs and your own personality that determine your answer to this question.

Philosophers merely document what you believe and what kind of arguments come to your mind when you think about such questions. Philosophers cannot decide or prove anything from "first principles".

People in different cultures come to believe different things about the personal identity, responsibility, justice, dignity and so on. If these questions were solvable by an abstract argument "from first principles", the answers would have been everywhere the same, in all countries and during all historical epochs, like it is with mathematical theorems or the scientific results of physics or chemistry.