The essence of philosophy or why they hate philosophy

The author proposes metaphilosophical reflections on the destiny of philosophy in the contemporary world and its role in the formation of foundations of special and applied sciences. The author stresses that a human being can perceive things in two ways. The first one is rationally based on conceptual thinking. The second is the intuitive one. In this article, the author considers only the first type of perception. Conceptual thinking helps to cognize the essence of things in the forms of notions or ideas. They are not simply subjective, but they have some ontological sense. Also, the author justifies the necessity of philosophy as theoretical science that forms the essential awareness of things by a scientist. Philosophical thinking as conceptual thinking is awareness of the unity of the being and consciousness. We can even speak about the pair “consciousness-being” because they are inseparable from each other. Such conceptual thinking can be found in the Ancient Greek philosophy, especially in the philosophy of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Conceptual thinking also searches the beginning of all things because the beginning helps to generalize knowledge about things and to discover their source. It is true that philosophy as conceptual thinking proposes some strange image of the world. For example, the movement is relative or even doesn’t exist as this was proved by pre-Socratic Zeno of Elea or that our world is a copy of a higher world of ideas as this was argumented by Plato, etc. Such conceptual sentences are not clear for common sense. Obscurity of these sentences for common sense seems absurd. Therefore, for many people, philosophy is a set of such absurd sentences. The author argues that in order to understand conceptual philosophy, some experience of conceptual thinking and the skills of generalization are needed. A specialist narrow niche or a scientist who is occupied by an applied science needs such thinking in order to form the understanding of general concepts of his/her speciality or the applied science.