Some people never ask philosophical questions... It is usually luxury, a certain success at life that gives the ease, and the time required for thought...If religion works for you, and nature is bountiful, then why ask why, or why ask how.... If fate serves to explain reality, and if natural forms work for you, you will not question them; and why should you... Take it and celebrate... What drove the Greeks to philosophy and to an extent, the Romans; is that they were building on ruins, and in the case of the Romans were successful over people more advanced than themselves.... Having success, most people want to systematize it... And no one ever has...The seeds of ruin are in success.

Cool to know, but not at all what I asked, I was kind of looking for a date or specific era on when it started, and also Greeks and Romans were pretty close together geographicaly . . .

Yep - very interesting.

Although I think I knew it, I still find myself amazed at the similarity of the questions we ask. No matter how 'foreign'; we still seem to have the same concerns. Somehow this is comforting...



No clue (although I've probably read it somewhere). I'd guess the instant our ability to ask any question came into being.

When we witnessed our death.

William

I can recommend some official history, but history does not tell it all... Since it began in prehistory, it is both in our face and beyond our reach... The place to look is in myths, because there theology which is man's first attempt at philosophy was beginning to be worked out...There you see people having a sense of spiritualism moving from naturalism to animism to religious spiritualism...Very often there was an obvious search for truth, but as often you can see people settling on the first decent answer they came to... Creationsim is old, but it still answers the question for many, and so you can get beck to work on survival, because the answer is not nearly so important as people not asking questions they cannot answer which keeps them from the constants necessity of feeding survival...So look into the dark world of fairy tales, myths, and magic if you want the roots of philosophy..If you want truth, what is most required is a false theory, or any theory; and for that the imagination of mankind, his fears and fancies served our purpose..Looking at ancient philosophy, you can see evidence of a perfectly rational people sometimes thousands of years ahead of mankinds ability to disprove or support the theories they advanced... So the qualities needed are reason and imaginaton, two qualities that serve philosophy well even today..

Do you not mean imagined??? It is our fears that have populated the world with spirits, and spirits still have us like puppets on a string.. What are morals but spirits???

No. Death, as far as what we know about it is definitely a part of our reality. It is not imagined. The Father and Mother I knew are no longer a part of that reality at least in any way my senses can detect. Is it finite? I believe definitely not. It is something other than "being" in the physical realm. Call it spirit, energy, soul, essence or whatever you want, what matters to us, selfishly so, is being. That's all that matters. It has been established nothing ever really ceases to exist, though it is unknown what happens in the transition of death and pondering that unknown is why we ask philosophical questions. We don't like groping in the dark. We "need" to have a meaning for everything before we can feel safe. What makes philosophy so difficult is in our discussion as we effort to find some meaning to life, we get bogged because we consider our existence so brief. That's why we keep going over the same questions again and again and again. Once we finally come to the realization our eternal nature will there be no need to wonder what meaning life has as we begin for the first time to live it without fear eagerly anticipating what tomorrow will bring in that journey.

William

Death is a part of our reality, but until we could imagine death, fear death when death was not around we could not conceive of ourselves spiritually, and so we could not conceive of our reality spiritual which result in our general conceiving of everything...
The conservation of matter has been show wrong even while it is generally considered true... And it is true that all of our concepts are conserved... They would be useless if they continually changed their values... It is illogical to think that we or our ideas of the world will survive after our deaths...It is natural enough thought...We have life, so we can conceive of life and only life, which is to say we cannot conceive of death any more than we can conceive of nothing...Life as we live it is an infinite, since we cannot see the end of it, and yet we know objectively that it does end, and to focus on the necessities of our infinite lives we deny that it is finite... But it is finite, and there are not so many spirits surrounding us, of nature, of loved ones, of angels or gods... Lonely as it is, we are alone, and have always been so; and while I might agree that this was a better world when we had some reverence for nature and had to give thanks, and show respect; still it was in its way far more cruel... Humanity can master any nature but our own... We find it easier to change the climate of the world than to change human behavior...

I must disagree about meaning... Meaning is life... All things have greater or lesser meaning, which is to say value- based upon their necessity for life...The smallest critters find meaning in their lives, and we find meaning outside of our lives which often finds us doing much to keep ourselves alive in body that are spiritually exhausting...We are only going over the same questions because, in a sense, we have not got the answers... Now, with the spiritual junk aside, I think Shopenhaur got it right, which is to say that I got it right, and many people got it right...The problems we face are moral, since, even with the correct understanding of knowledge, and how we conceive of reality, some one may take a moral dead end like Nietzsche did... Our problems are not really of science, or knowledge, which is far beyond our ability to keep up in our moral understanding.....

I would suggest that all things are attributed by human beings greater or lesser meaning based upon their perceived necessity for life. I would remain unconvinced that their universal meaning would perfectly match what we attribute to them.

Meaning is inevitably subjective, but also it tends to be what is good for life that is valued...Primitives valued community and would sacrifice themselves for community; but then, they could not conceive of themselves as individuals apart from their community...It was still survival, but joint survival, community survival...Mothers are the same with children, and even children for mothers...