The Bridge by Maya Detwiller The human brain is constantly under a barrage of questions; questions that range from

what color shirt to wear to what is the possible root of our existence. There is no man on this earth who can say he has not pondered the meaning of his life in the shower and no woman who can attest to never staring into the dark in the last seconds before sleep wondering whether or not she ever became the person her younger, more idealist self resolved to be. Everyone is born a philosopher but so few preserve the tiny spring of questions that bubbles from the corner of their mind. The people who do are labeled revolutionaries, genius, nerds, authors, and Nobel Peace Prize nominees. To name a few would require listing Socrates, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Euclid, Lucretius, and Cicero. However, its also impossible to omit Martin Luther King Jr., Edmund Gettier, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Mortimer Adler. Philosophy is a key humanizing connection that reaches across the centuries to bridge an understanding of the knowledge and nature of the people who thrived in Ancient Greece and Rome and the descendants that continue their survival today. Thinking has never been a negative addition to our present society. Children are told to think before they speak. Speaking without thought is a very dangerous risk. Few times is a person lucky enough to exude a semblance of intelligence. It is more common to witness a few brain cells trickle off of the drivel that is forced from someones tongue and see the cells plop to the ground with scorn at the misuse of such sophisticated utensils as themselves. Thought before speech is the only possible way to communicate effectively and communication is the only way to properly share the answers to philosophys most plaguing mysteries.

When philosophies are shared, the audience takes in such observations and analyses and flips them about like a pancake. All angles are inspected and improved or disproved and the mind takes such jubilation in the exercise of its potential, these thoughts are perfectly translated into english that soars from lips into the ears of a new audience. This audience then repeats the process and new audiences are exposed until the entire population stops to flex its frontal lobe. Progress is made and as seen in Greece and Rome, advances in science, math, medicine, and visual/language arts seem to inundate the world. Every facet of daily life is affected by thought and philosophy and can only be improved. Philosophy betters our society by helping us understand what is about and in us. Martin Luther King Jr.s philosophy won a battle in the war for civil rights. Pythagoras discovered a formula that balanced a pixel of our expansive universe. John Green wrote of the torment of the question of human futility and surrounded it with a love story. Philosophy not only attempts to explain and organize our universe, philosophy beautifies it as well.