Jason asked:

I'm very interested in philosophy and I want to learn how to comprehend theory in the same way as
other intellectuals. I'm only 17 and I've purchased Plato's Republicand it seems very interesting to
me. Is there anything you can tell me about becoming a philosopher in a figurative sense? I often
observe my peers at school and I write things down about their actions and my predictions as to why
they act in the ways they do. I find it very interesting, as well as challenging, to find out why they are
behaving this way. Is there more there to teach me advanced ways to go about searching? Where
can I find this information?

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First I think you may be confusing philosophy with psychology. Psychology is the science that
investigates why people behave as they do, not philosophy.

So I think that the first step you have to take to become a philosopher in any sense is to decide that
philosophy is, and not confuse it with something else, since if you do, you may find that you want to
become something else and not a philosopher at all.

This site has information on what philosophers do, and there are many of the sites on the Internet that
do this too. Go, for instance to Epistemelinks.com. Or go to Askme.com and register and ask a
question.

Why do you want to become a philosopher in the figurative sense, anyway? Perhaps you mean that
although you don't want to become a professional philosopher, you want to be an amateur
philosopher: think about philosophy without getting paid to think about philosophy.

But, as I have already said, if you don't know what philosophy is, and what philosophers do, you are
going to find it difficult to decide whether you want to be a philosopher at all, never mind the "sense."

Kenneth Stern