What in the world is philosophy? The word itself comes from the two Greek words: philia and sophia. Philia is the Greek word for 'love' (a bond of friendship), while sophia is Greek for 'wisdom'. Philosophy is literally the "love of wisdom". But what does it mean to love, pursue, and possess wisdom?
To understand this better, consider that most of us know through experience that not everyone who is knowledgeable is wise. Some people have a great deal of learning, but very little wisdom. Clearly there is a difference between knowledge and wisdom. What exactly is the difference between the two?
Let us begin with knowledge of the scientific kind, since most of us are more familiar with it; for even kids can possess it. The word "science" comes from the Latin verb scire, which means "to know". Science, therefore, is about possessing a certain kind of knowledge. Some people are under the impression that science is about knowing facts. But science is much more than that; for everyone knows certain basic facts, such as "leaves are green", or "the sky is blue", or that "people get cancer", etc, and that doesn't make them scientists. A person has science, however, when he knows the reason for the fact, such as why leaves are green, or the reason for cancer, etc. Science is about reasoned facts. In other words, one has science when one knows the cause of the fact.
Now that which manifests a desire to possess "science" is the act of questioning. The word question comes from the Latin querere, which means to quest, to journey, or to search. To question is to go out on a quest in search of something, namely the cause of a fact, or the reason for it. That is why science is fundamentally a knowledge of things through their proper causes.
Wisdom is a kind of science, and so it too is a knowledge of things through causes. But, more precisely, wisdom is a knowledge of the highest causes. It is the intellectual virtue by which a person judges in light of the highest or first causes. That is why we sometimes find wisdom in older people, for they have had the years of experience to "see the larger picture", so to speak. They have encountered many kinds of people throughout their lives, they have been deceived before, lied to, have been pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised by things they weren't aware of, they've made mistakes, have had time to reflect upon their mistakes and the mistakes of their friends, associates, and family, and they have come to learn how to distinguish the genuine friend from the false friend, they know something about what marriage really is as opposed to what they thought it was when they first married, they understand what love really is and what it is not, they understand that they knew very little when they thought they knew a lot, and so they know something about human limitations, which they didn't quite appreciate when they were younger. And so they understand something about human nature and human frailty, and they are able to give us advice on whom we ought to be careful of, whom we can trust, what to expect in the future, etc.
Such people are wise as a result of experience, honest reflection, and the ability to reason. Not everyone over 50 is wise, because not everyone over 50 is honest, reflective, or rational. And one has no need of a microscope in order to be wise. But one cannot do biology, for example, without a microscope. And so philosophy, which is the love of wisdom, does not require technology. The reason is that philosophy is the pursuit of first or ultimate causes; it is the study of the ultimate nature of things. Empiriological science, unlike philosophy, seeks the proximate causes of things, not their ultimate causes.