A definition of philosophy

[C C]

Philosophy is the employment of reason to investigate / understand our formal systems (intellectual products) and the active pursuits (disciplines, etc) that they either regulate or fall out of. As well as the creation / formulation of arguments, ideologies, methods, disciplines, divisions of knowledge, and their conceptual backgrounds or working presuppositions thus so requiring the recruitment of existing philosophical templates or interests. This includes the study / invention of schemes for proper thinking / reasoning themselves (philosophy's primal tools) and the meta-study of philosophy itself.

A traditional view of "knowledge passion" as consisting of only a few specialized branches (logic, epistemology, ethics, ontology, aesthetics, etc) is one subset view subsumed under the above broader conception of philosophy. The latter being more applicable to the extended diversification of the fields which philosophy investigates today and revived recognition of philosophical activity's pervasiveness in underlying any non-arbitrary "guide or system for proceeding" outputted by human thought.

[Yazata]

I guess that I'd define 'philosophy' as something along the lines of 'the rational investigation into the assumptions, principles and procedures that underly every human endeavor. (I don't mean to suggest that all endeavors share the same assumptions, principles and procedures, only that everything presumably has its own set.)

Or perhaps, put another way, philosophy is the retention of the child-like tendency to ask 'why?' (or 'how?' or 'what is that?'), repeatedly, in every circumstance. (One finds, that it only takes a few iterations of those questions to arrive at the frontiers of human knowledge, whatever the subject.)

[Magical Realist]

There's philosophy in the abstract--of the systematic and firsthand inquiry into our own being and our own experience. It is introspective, questioning, and generalizable to a universal scale. When we DO philosophy, we are peering into the abyss of our own condition, inferring aspects and properties that underlie our very nature. But I like to think there is an instinctive basis for this mental capacity. I think this is the fundamental ability to wonder and reflect. It comes after the cavemen have had a good meal, and are all around the fire basking in the comfort of being full and relaxed. When they stroll outside the cave they look up and really notice the mystery of the stars for the first time. The philosophical impulse comes over oneself almost like daydreaming, carrying you into a world that transcends that of sensory immediacies It is the luxury of spontaneous revery and imaginative play, practical in the sense that it applies to our common nature and condition, and spiritual in the sense that it frees us from the tyrrany of one distracting event after another. It's what makes us human, this power to know the encompassing universe from the inside out.