Cicely Francis asked:

How would you compare and contrast philosophy and religion, and also philosophy and science?

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One of the ways of approaching the question what philosophy is, is to explain what philosophy is not.
Philosophy is not religion. Philosophy is not science.

The two statements I have just made about philosophy do more than simply narrow down the field of
possibilities concerning what philosophy is, or might be. It is one of the features that essentially
belong to the activity of the philosophy that one labours under the intermittent or constant temptation
towards seeing philosophy as a kind of religion, or, alternatively, as a kind of science.

In the opening paragraphs of my paper, Can Philosophy be Taught? I talk about the temptation to
'make a God out of philosophy'. In my paper, I called that a 'foolish mistake' and offered the throw
away remark, 'I sincerely hope it's not one I've ever been tempted to make'. But that is untrue. I have
been tempted. Otherwise, how would I know what I was talking about?

Worship, and a conception of what is holy, are the core of religion. (I don't necessarily mean worship
of a personal God, as in the Judeo-Christian tradition.) Religious practices, like prayer and meditation,
are designed to open ourselves up to experiencing, or receiving, that which is immeasurably higher
than us, that which is what we are not.

Philosophy, or the greatest philosophical or metaphysical systems, are merely a product of human
endeavour. To worship what we ourselves have made is idolatry.

Nor is philosophy science. Once again, you can't really understand what that means if you have not,
at some time, wished that philosophy could be made 'scientific'. To qualify as a science, an inquiry
does not need to be based on observing or collecting facts, or putting forward empirically testable
hypotheses. Mathematics is a science. But philosophy is not mathematics. Even Plato, who famously
put above the doors of his Academy, 'Let no-one who has not studied mathematics enter here' knew
this. Even, I believe, Descartes, despite his well-advertised attempt in the Discourse on Methodand
Meditationsto apply the 'geometrical method' to philosophy.

In philosophy, there are no fixed starting points. No philosophical term of any consequence has ever
been successfully defined. One is constantly striving to understand the significance of the things that
the on-going dialectic obliges, or tempts us, to say. We never quite know where we are. That is why
the illusion of a 'scientific' philosophy appears so tempting.

Geoffrey Klempner