What is philosophy?

Not to bias anyones opinion before this begins I'm not going to write anything. I just want to hear what people think philosophy is...define it, tell a story, relate it to something, etc.

My experience with philosophy has been this :
- words never mean what they mean in real life
- philosophy involves redefining things to make them less contradictory
- philosophy is reasoning from premises to arrive to a conclusion. It is different from math as it involves no numbers. It is different from science in that philosophical reasoning is very abstract and does not look for specific truths.
Of course all this has been with my philosophy teacher whom I have a hate for. Well not hate, but he's frustrating as hell, very airy and abstract.

every science was considered philosophy until the abstractions were taken out of them. i don't know, but saying philosophy involves no numbers or specific truths isn't very accurate. just look at pythagoras, the philosopher who thought that numbers were the basis of the universe. i think asking abstract questions about anything turns it into a philosophical question, whether it be math, art, any of the sciences, or philosophy itself.

Pragmatically, philososphy could be alot of things. The meta-questions are generally the questions that philosophers ask, though not always. "How do I know that I know?" and "What is 'is'?" The movement of logical postivism thought of themselves as providing guidelines for science to follow when finding scientific knowledge. So the logical postivists thought of themelves generally as epistemtologists, those who study knowledge.

But, with the advent of science growing in numbers and quality, scientists really started to cut out a niche for themselves. Philosophers then started to wonder what was their proper realm of inquiry. Enter Phenomenology. Phenomenologists study human experience. Heidegger one of the most famous Phenomenologist, devoted most of his life to the "is" question.

The relationship between science and philosophy is not as strong in some parts of the movement of philosophy. I think that Phenomenologist deplore science, while logical postivists think of themselves as guiding it. But in most cases, I think there is an element of philosophy is partly a way of life, but it is also being the kid who puts his dipstick into everyone's oil pan, thinking that he is making life better. So to answer the first question about what is philosophy. I think that it would depend on what philosopher you were talking to. But, in general, I think philosophy asks the big Meta-questions.

Philosophy - A route leading from nowhere to nothing =O
But really, i think its just exploring the unknown and restudying what we really think we know but is unclear or has multiple sides. Or asking why to the simplist questions that really have a difficult answer.

Aw, so many people have better expressions :'(