Why is love of wisdom not a good answer for what philosophy actually is ?

Why is love of wisdom not a good answer for what philosophy actually is ?

~~~ It is vague and meaningless and impractical as a definition.
Even after knowing this 'translation', you still do not know what philosophy is!
'Love of wisdom' is merely the literal translation of the word, NOT a definition!
That is a perfect example of 'literalists' remaining ever clueless!

Philosophy is predominately 'original critical thought', and all the sciences, all avenues of Knowing... are feeder branches on the tree of philosophy!

It recognises one aspect of philosophy, but there are a multitude of aspects you could consider. It's as good an answer as any of the stock answers we regurgitate but if you have experienced neither love or wisdom it fails to convey the complete deeper spirit of philosophy and how it operates. Arguing from a philosophical stance we all have our own perceptions, perspectives, and preferences. Thats why philosophers rarely agree on anything, including exactly what "philosophy" actually is.

It is a good "definition" of the word.

The original meaning of the word philosophy comes from the Greek roots philo- meaning "love" and -sophos, or "wisdom." When someone studies philosophy they want to understand how and why people do certain things and how to live a good life. In other words, they want to know the meaning of life. Add the suffix -er to philosophy, and you get a word for someone whose job it is to think these big thoughts.

I take "philosophy" to be an English word referring to a certain kind of thinking, a certain kind of approach to a certain kind of problem. To explain those "certain kind of"s would take a book; perhaps the best I can do here is gesture at what it is that English-language philosophers do.

The main point, though, is that philosophy isn't distinguished so much by what it's about as by the nature of the activity. The presentation of opinions, theories, or advice isn't philosophy, no matter what the content. Doing philosophy involves thinking about things in a certain (rigorous, questioning) way, offering arguments for one's ideas, meeting arguments against them, and being prepared to change one's mind.

In most languages there are words that are translated into English as 'philosophy' -- in European languages, those words often share the same Greek roots as the English word. The activities to which such words refer have a history shared with philosophy, but at some point after Kant there was a parting of the ways. The activities referred to by `philosophy' are different in various ways from the activities referred to by words like `philosophie', `Philosophie', `filosofia', etc.

When we come to non-European cultures, matters are even more complex. When Europeans encountered other cultures, they attempted to understand them by identifying aspects of those cultures with aspects of their own. If an activity or object shared some of the attributes of European religion, or philosophy, or gods, or saints, then those words were applied. Thus deeply different cultures were forced into the European conceptual mould. (One of the initial problems for, say, the philosophy of religion, is to see how terms like `faith', `god', or `prayer' mean very different things in different cultures.) So again, I prefer not to use the English word `philosophy' to refer to activities in such different cultures.

This isn't evaluative. When I say that something isn't really philosophy, I'm not necessarily saying that it's inferior, only that it's different. Philosophy, in this central English sense, and other disciplines may well have things in common, and there may be people whose work draws on both - but that's true of philosophy and many other academic disciplines. As an English word, I prefer to use `philosophy' to refer to what's done in English, to its antecedents, and to sufficiently similar activities in other cultures (for example, to certain thinking and writing in China and India over the centuries).

If one is inclined to question the rightness of the label/term "philosophy," one approach might be to recognize the original insights regarding wisdom (wise dominion) and love (wholeness of energy) are not generally understood in the more profound ways Pythagoras and Plato presented them. Instead, modern (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and so on) "thinking" primarily regards Kantian phenomena with various axiomized logics qua systems of interpreting and asserting sociological and psychological perspectives of the thinker. What Husserl, Heidegger, Popper and Wittgenstein, for example, "think," are various methodologies or Cartesian attempts to find "Grund" (Heidegger; in Kant, the antecedent of a true conditional; in Whitehead, "actual entities") re psycho-social "surrounds" (Jaspers); a current thinker/philosopher who explicitly works with this psycho-sociological "surround" is Peter Sloterdijk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sloterdijk .

Isn't philosophy the search for truth. Isn't love of wisdom good?

To my mind, currently philosophy's trend is to pursue wisdom's essence to affirm destruction and harm to man.

For some philosophers this notion is true but for some it definitely is false. Wisdom was not Hegel's goal. Nor was it the goal of Derrida.

I have been an iconoclast my entire life, which is why a great many people do not like me. Like a little child, I always ask why, and as a consequence I never accept what "they say" as being obvious or necessarily true. This is a case in point. It is a good answer.I've read all the answers you've been given so far and I think they are over-analytical and complicate a simple question. Philosophy constitutes a search for and the love of truth. Emma, if you want to live your own life, one of the most important things to bear in mind is NOT to believe what everyone says. From the time I became a trouble-maker, (probably around the age of four), I questioned what everyone says or does, and lots of times I found that what everyone said or did wasn't true for me. If you find, as I have, that philosophy is a love of wisdom, then don't let what everyone else says change your mind. As for long and complex analyses, two thoughts come to mind: Freud once said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," and Hesse said, " You kill all things for me with words."

Because a love of wisdom can be, and ultimately is, much different.

Philosophy *itself* is more of a break-down, and interpretive understanding, of life
and therein, not necessarily a 'love' of wisdom.

Who says it's not? Anyway, wisdom is one thing, but I'm not sure philosophy is about that. Wisdom is emotional knowledge. Philosophy is more about intellectual knowledge, in my estimation. But I think the overall goal of it, intellectual or wisdom, is to sort out what we really do know from what we really don't.