Sphinx of philosophy

If you spend a lot of time thinking with your mind maps you are going to run into questions that have no good answers. As you know or don’t know, the sphinx, besides a big old statue with a broken nose, is a mythological figure who asked riddles. If you couldn’t answer his question... Well, you really wanted to be able to answer his question. The sphinx of philosophy is similar, only that there are no right answers. You fail if you don’t really believe your answer yourself. You pass if you do have a good answer that you are comfortable with.

Many people consider subjects like philosophy as something utterly impractical. To me it’s just the opposite. It’s true that it’s hard to feed a family just by contemplating the nature of bread, but that’s exactly what you might find yourself doing if you create a mind map called ‘bread’. When you want to organize and categorize the content in your mind maps ever better, you need to be able to make finer distinctions between your thoughts and the reality.

I don’t know if you ever took an introductory course in philosophy or stopped to look and marvel at your hand for a very long time for some other reason. Or maybe you already started to wonder whether such a figure as the sphinx even existed, I mean where’s the proof? At that point it might help to google about ontology and epistemology. You might not find the answers for the sphinx right away, but at least you’ll find out that you are not alone with them.

You have to find your own strategy to deal with the sphinx. If you cannot come up with good answers straight away, maybe you can just slip past by shutting your ears, not listening to him. Maybe you can reply with another question? Buy yourself some more time to find your solution.