All the time, the Society has remained proud of its amateur status. We are a group of enthusiasts, seeking to communicate our enthusiasm for all aspects of philosophy and philosophical thinking far and wide. The Philosopher has recently undergone a major face lift under its new Editor, Martin Cohen, currently Research Fellow in Education at the College of St Mark and St John, Plymouth, who welcomes contributions from members or non-members alike. The tone is up-beat and pithy, but never flippant or pretentious. For someone who is seeking to stimulate their appetite for rational inquiry, the occurrence of the word 'philosophical' in the title of an organisation or society is, sadly, no longer any guarantee that the goods on offer have any connection with the real meaning of that term, that is to say, the meaning defined by the Western tradition of philosophical thought over the last two and a half thousand years.
Philosophy is the art of rational thought.
Every branch of knowledge depends upon rational thinking, but philosophy is unique in that the application of reason and logic becomes the very source of knowledge - whether employed critically, in the examination of the assumptions underlying a field of inquiry or belief system, or constructively in the search for necessary truths about the nature of reality itself. Each individual who discovers philosophy repeats in his or her own life the story of the very beginnings of philosophy. The ability to theorise, to derive knowledge by a process of reasoning, struck the earliest thinkers in ancient Greece as an almost magical power. They constructed theories about everything in the universe. Then the doubts set in.