"Perhaps there are people who embark on the study of philosophy because they are worried about whether the external world really exists, or whether they can tell the difference between dreaming and being awake, or whether it is OK to argue in syllogisms, but I have never met any. Although one can, once one gets started, become thoroughly engrossed in any of these problems, one never starts with them. One starts with ethics; that is, one starts with the realization that not everyone has the same values as oneself and the hope that one will find some way to justify one’s own values. This realization may occur in the toils of an actual moral dilemma, or in finding that a friend cannot see any point in a novel you admire, or in any other of an almost infinite variety of ways. Whatever there is in us that makes us want to fit every part of our experience together with every other part makes us also try to fit our values, our goals, our attitudes toward other people, into some larger scheme. The attempt to do this – to justify theses values and goals and attitudes is, I think, what starts people studying philosophy."
"On Philosophy and Philosophers: Unpublished Papers, 1960–2000" by Richard Rorty: https://a.co/33Yvv0n
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