What Is Philosophy, and Why Do Philosophers Answer Questions with Questions?

Last updated: November 3, 2026

Philosophy, from the Greek philosophia, “love of knowledge, pursuit of wisdom”, is the practice of asking questions that no settled method can answer yet: what exists, what we can know, how we should live. Plato’s Theaetetus (155d) gives the classic origin story, when Socrates tells a puzzled young mathematician that “philosophy begins in wonder” (Jowett translation). Bertrand Russell added the uncomfortable corollary in The Problems of Philosophy (1912): as soon as definite knowledge about a subject becomes possible, it stops being called philosophy, and the value of what remains lies “largely in its very uncertainty”. That is the short answer to why philosophers so often reply to a question with another one.

The asking questions meme puts the same idea in two panels. On top, a man stares into the camera with tears running down his face: “Scientists and mathematicians when they can’t get answers to something.” Below, another man grins and adjusts a pair of gold sunglasses: “Philosophers when they can’t get the answers to something.” Philosophers have been grinning at open questions since Socrates.

Lovers of Wisdom, Not Owners of It

Philosophy literally means the love of wisdom, and Plato’s dialogues treat the philosopher as someone who wants wisdom precisely because he does not have it.

A popular legend credits Pythagoras with the name: in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations (V.8 to 9), a ruler named Leon asks him which art he professes, and Pythagoras answers that he knows none, “but that he was a philosopher” (Yonge translation). Life, he explains, is like the great games, where some come for the crown, some to buy and sell, and the best simply come to watch. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy traces the story to Heraclides of Pontus in the early Academy and doubts its accuracy, since its idea of the philosopher is “thoroughly Platonic”.

The Platonist view is spelled out in the Symposium. Diotima, the woman from Mantineia whom Socrates credits as his teacher in love, tells him that “No god is a philosopher”, since gods are wise already, and that the ignorant do not seek wisdom either, because they are satisfied with themselves. Lovers of wisdom sit in the middle: they know enough to notice what they lack.

It Starts When Something Stops Making Sense

Plato and Aristotle agreed on where philosophy begins: in wonder, the moment something familiar turns out to be puzzling.

In the Theaetetus, the young Theaetetus admits that a run of Socrates’ puzzles leaves him perplexed and amazed. Socrates is delighted, because “wonder is the feeling of a philosopher”, he says, and adds a pun: whoever made Iris the child of Thaumas was a good genealogist. Iris is the rainbow and messenger of the gods, thauma is the Greek word for wonder, so philosophy is the messenger born of astonishment. Aristotle repeats the thought in Metaphysics I.2 (982b, Ross translation): people began to philosophise “owing to their wonder”, first about obvious puzzles, then about the moon, the sun, the stars and the origin of everything. He even grants that “the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom”, because myths are made of wonders too.

The PHIL / OSOPHY meme shows what happens next. A stone inscription reads PHILOSOPHY, with two hand-drawn brackets. Under “PHIL”: “Hey suddenly I’m finding answers to all of my questions”, so let’s dig deeper. Under “OSOPHY”: “Oh God! What have I done? I cannot go back”, followed by a panic about why one even says “God” and “hell”, and why one tries to escape suffering at all. The meme’s second bracket is where the answers start asking questions back.

Leo Tolstoy lived through the second bracket. In A Confession, written between 1879 and 1882 according to Penguin, the author of War and Peace, with an estate, a family and good health, describes how one question brought him to the edge of suicide around the age of fifty: “What will come of my whole life?” The experimental sciences, he concluded, ignore the question, and the abstract ones recognise it without answering. He found his way out in the faith and the working lives of ordinary labouring people, which he came to see as life itself. You can read that as giving up on philosophy or as the most philosophical move in the book. Tolstoy himself framed it as a turn from reasoned knowledge to faith.

Socrates, the Midwife Who Refused to Deliver Answers

Philosophers answer questions with questions because Socrates, as Plato portrays him, made it his method and said so openly.

In the Theaetetus, Socrates introduces himself as “the son of a midwife”, Phaenarete, and says he practises the same art on minds. “I am barren”, he says, and he concedes the reproach people often make against him, that “I ask questions of others” and have no answers of his own, because the god compels him to help others give birth and forbids him to bring forth himself. His job is to test whether the idea a young man produces is a real child or a phantom. Not everyone found this charming. In book I of the Republic, the sophist Thrasymachus loses his temper: “that’s your ironical style!”, he snaps, and complains that there is “many a one who can ask and cannot answer”.

The method has a point that the irritation misses: a contradiction someone finds in their own beliefs moves them further than an answer handed over. In the Apology, Socrates tells the jury that “the unexamined life is not worth living” (Jowett translation), which turns the habit of questioning into a way of life.

Answering a Question With a Question

There is an old joke that gets told about rabbis, Socrates and philosophy professors alike. “Why do you always answer a question with a question?” “Why shouldn’t I?” It survives because it is half insult and half compliment, and the asking questions meme above works the same way. Answering with a question can be a dodge. It can also be the only honest reply. The Talmud, after all, is built largely out of questions and objections recorded across generations of rabbinic debate, and nobody accuses it of avoiding hard topics.

There are at least three good reasons to do it. The first is that the question rests on a false assumption. “Have you stopped cheating at cards?” cannot be answered yes or no without admitting something, and logicians call it a loaded or complex question. The right response is to question the question. The second is that the key term is unclear. Ask a philosopher whether the self is real and you will be asked what you mean by “self”, which sounds evasive until you notice that the answer really does change depending on the meaning, a problem we explore in “Define Normal”. The third is teaching. A conclusion you reach yourself sticks in a way a handed-down answer does not, which is the whole idea of the Socratic midwife.

The bad reason is just as familiar. Politicians answer questions with questions to avoid committing themselves, and the meme of someone smugly announcing “I don’t answer questions” captures the annoyance perfectly. Thrasymachus’ complaint about Socrates was exactly this. The difference between philosophy and evasion is what happens next. An evasive question ends the conversation; a philosophical one makes it longer and more precise, and eventually someone has to commit to an answer and defend it.

Scientists Cry, Philosophers Put on Sunglasses

The meme exaggerates a real difference: science tends to close questions by testing answers, while philosophy works on questions before anyone knows what a test would even look like.

The difference is smaller than the meme suggests, because science also starts with a guess. Karl Popper, in Logik der Forschung (1934, imprint 1935) and Conjectures and Refutations (1963), argued that scientific theories begin as conjectures that no logical procedure produces, and that testing can only try to refute them; the SEP entry on Popper summarises his view that all knowledge stays provisional. Even a famous eureka moment comes with a question attached. According to William Stukeley’s Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life, published in 1752, Newton told him, after dinner in a garden, that the idea of gravitation came to him when an apple fell while he sat in a contemplative mood, as Scientific American reports. What Stukeley records is a question, prompted by an ordinary apple.

Russell drew the boundary in chapter XV of The Problems of Philosophy. Ask a mathematician, a mineralogist or a historian what their field has established, he writes, and the answer “will last as long as you are willing to listen”. Put the same question to a philosopher and the list gets much shorter, because questions that find a reliable method of answer tend to leave philosophy and become sciences of their own, as physics did. Philosophy keeps the questions that have not found one.

Questions Science Cannot Answer, at Least Not Alone

Search for “questions science can’t answer” and you will find lists that mix real puzzles with things science simply has not answered yet, like the origin of life or the nature of dark matter. Those are hard but scientific: we know roughly what kind of evidence would settle them. The philosophically interesting questions are different. Further observation will not settle them, because they concern what counts as evidence, what we ought to value, or what our scientific theories presuppose.

Some of these may one day migrate into science, as questions about motion, heat and life once did. Others may stay with philosophy for good, because they concern the framework within which science itself operates. Even the most basic scientific practice, expecting the future to resemble the past, rests on a principle that David Hume showed cannot be proved without assuming it, a puzzle we revisit in why Hume says you cannot infer causation. The philosopher in the sunglasses is not happy because there are no answers. He is happy because he knows which questions are his.

The Branches of Philosophy, and How Things Hang Together

If you want a definition that fits on a postcard, the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars offered one of the best in 1962: the aim of philosophy is “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” Philosophy, on this view, is not a subject with its own private objects, the way botany has plants. It is the attempt to see how everything else fits: science and morality, mind and matter, language and the world.

Universities nevertheless divide the territory into branches, and the division follows the big questions. Metaphysics asks what exists and what it is like: whether there is free will, what minds are, whether time passes. Epistemology asks how we know any of it, and what separates knowledge from lucky guessing. Logic studies what follows from what, the rules of valid reasoning that every other branch relies on. Ethics asks how we should live and what we owe each other, and political philosophy extends the question to states, laws and justice. Aesthetics asks what beauty and art are, and why a urinal in a gallery can start a century of arguments. Around these sit the philosophies of particular fields: of science, mind, language, religion, mathematics and, increasingly, of technology and artificial intelligence.

The branches are a convenience, not a fence. Almost every interesting question crosses several of them. Whether you are responsible for your actions is a question in metaphysics, because it depends on free will; in ethics, because it concerns blame; and in epistemology, because it depends on what you could have known. Sellars’ definition captures exactly this. Specialists dig in one field, but the philosophical moment comes when someone asks how the findings of one field fit with those of another, and discovers that they do not quite fit at all.

That is also why philosophy so often answers a question with another question. The second question is usually an attempt to find out which branch the first one belongs to, and what has to be settled before it can be answered. It can be maddening at a dinner party. It is the method working, and it is the reason a good philosophical question tends to get bigger before it gets smaller.

Does Philosophy Make Progress? Chalmers Ran the Numbers

Philosophy makes progress in understanding, according to David Chalmers, but it rarely ends in agreement on answers.

Chalmers put the case in “Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy?” (Philosophy 90, 2015). He grants that the answer to “is there progress?” is obviously yes, then measures progress as “collective convergence to the truth” on the big questions, and finds far less of it than in the hard sciences. His evidence is the 2009 PhilPapers Survey of professional philosophers: on 23 of its thirty big questions, the leading view had under 60 percent support. His explanations include disciplinary speciation (solved questions leave philosophy), verbal disputes, the distance between philosophical theses and observable data, and the uncomfortable possibility that human minds did not evolve to be good at philosophy. Our post on the endless cycle of philosophical inquiry goes through his argument in detail.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari offered a different yardstick in What Is Philosophy? (1991; English translation by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, 1994). The question, as the publisher quotes the book, “can perhaps only be posed late in life”, and their answer is that philosophy is “the creation or construction of concepts”, as the SEP puts it, alongside science, which creates functions, and art, which creates percepts and affects. On that view a new concept, a new way of carving up a problem, counts as an achievement even if nobody agrees on the answer. The photo of a dozen books stacked on a ledge makes the joke for them: Deleuze and Guattari, Heidegger, José Ortega y Gasset, Giorgio Agamben, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Stephan Körner and others, every spine titled What Is Philosophy?. The shelf is the definition debate in book form.

Useless, Said Thales’ Neighbours

Philosophy was already mocked as useless in a story Aristotle tells about Thales, one of the first Greek philosophers, and its defenders have answered with olive presses and with arguments.

Aristotle tells it in Politics I.11 (Jowett translation). Thales of Miletus was mocked for his poverty, which supposedly showed that “philosophy was of no use”. Reading the stars, he foresaw a huge olive harvest while it was still winter, paid small deposits on every olive press in Chios and Miletus, and rented them out at his own price when the harvest came. The moral, says Aristotle, is that “philosophers can easily be rich if they like”, but their ambition lies elsewhere. In the Metaphysics he goes further and calls philosophy “the only free science”, pursued for its own sake, like a free man who lives for himself and not for another. The modern versions of the complaint, from “philosophy is dead” to “why are you wasting your time”, get their own treatment in our post on philosophy’s superiority complex.

Russell’s defence in “The Value of Philosophy” is more personal. The person with “no tincture of philosophy”, he writes, goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices of common sense and habit. Philosophy cannot tell us with certainty which answer is true, but it frees us from “the tyranny of custom” and “keeps alive our sense of wonder” by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar light. It is to be studied, he concludes, “for the sake of the questions themselves”, because they enlarge our sense of what is possible.

The flyer meme makes the sales pitch with brutal honesty. Pinned to a corkboard: “Do you want to find yourself uncomfortable by questioning all your fundamental belief systems?” Then: “Come study philosophy with us!” Below it, an 1828 lithograph of Hegel lecturing to a few students, credited to Franz Kugler and held in Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett. The tear-off strips at the bottom all say “NO THANKS”. The questioning does not have to happen in a lecture hall, either: Socrates did it in the marketplace, and our post on street philosophy vs academic philosophy follows it there, along with the actual data on what a philosophy degree is worth.

If you want to try the question-for-a-question routine yourself, start with our guide to the Socratic method as an ideal dialogue.