How to Do Philosophy

We've gone off-topic, though: the main point here is that Diogenes' own philosophy is worthy, even though society at that time found it less palatable than Plato's.

People ignored it (and still do) because it's less certain than Plato's "reliable" model of patterns, and also because it means giving up material comforts.

It's only an opinion, and it's situated in a certain culture and situation.

If you look closer, quite everything needs a 'correction'.

If you want something perfect, humans are the wrong place to search for.

When you really dig into Rand, her ethics are essentially a modernized version of Aristotle's virtue ethics. Most of her ethical theory revolved around core values (Reason, Purpose, Self-Esteem) and virtues that supported these values (Pride, Rationality, Integrity, Productiveness, Independence, and Justice). Many argue she left out a few important virtues like benevolence, but overall it's a pretty good and useful list. She didn't necessarily agree with Aristotle's "Doctrine of the Mean" (virtue is the mean between two extremes), but otherwise her ethics are very Aristotelian.

Hate to be unpoetic, but how is a star anything more than a big ball of burning gas? I don't feel humans are 'better' than stars. The only loosely related comparison I can think of is complexity: there is more to know about humans than about stars.

Metaphysics: What is true, without exceptions, about things that are not physical or on the boundary of being physical. Ontology: What is true, without exceptions, about existence (being) Epistemology: What is true, without exceptions, about how you know what you know Ethics: What is true about the way things ought to be, without exceptions.

Epistemology/Ontology/Metaphysics have provided lots of value for those that love truth without exceptions.

If you read philosophers and try to see the problems they want to solve within those branches of philosophy, ask yourself what are the exceptions. When you try to battle with them, you will have the feeling of thinking you are the first one to climb a large mountain, only to find a whole city at the top with a lot of people saying, 'What took you so long to get here? PS here are the real mountains for you to climb!'

Is there anything that is true (epistemology)? If false, why have an essay? If true, what is it?

A simple start, can a self refuting statement be true? Well the vast majority of philosophers would tell you no. That is to say they would believe the following statement to be true:

1) Self refuting statements are false or inscrutable.

So you have plenty of people in the world that deny (1). Philosophy allows the Descarte types to relax when dealing with these people.

So lets take a Descarte truth based on (1). That would be:

2) I cannot doubt doubting.

Or in other words I do not have the ability to doubt my ability to doubt. Then when someone says something like this:

4) If I am multiple pieces, I do not exist (?!) 5) Empirical data has shown that I am multiple pieces (cells) 6) Therefore I do not exist

a descarte type doesn't waste brain energy on either (4) or (5) (or both).

To sum this up, philosophy is the domain of what is necessarily the case. Science (positivism) has nothing to say about this. That is what philosophy brings to the table. But only a descarte type would enjoy this.

For programmers, an analogy could be said as lisp programmers laugh at the 'pattern circus' and the 'aspect oriented design' of other languages (which basically fix what should not have been broken in the first place), philosophers laught 10X as much at people that say things like 'I don't exist' and 'there are no true statements' and wish that they could help them, but know that some people love their circus so they let them have their fun.