Philosophy Is About Truth Rather Than Wisdom

The word philosophy may have initially been used to refer to the love of "wisdom," but it is truth and not wisdom that all valid philosophy aims for.  All beliefs and ideas, the true and false ones alike, are either philosophies or part of one.  It does not matter what words one uses to refer to philosophy; this is what it is.  There is nothing outside the scope of philosophy, nor is such a thing even hypothetically possible.  There are only more or less foundational and more or less important or precise truths and ideas.  Wisdom would be at best a subcategory within the subjects of philosophy that is a mere background issue compared to truth and epistemology.

That the word philosophy was once used in reference to wisdom does not mean that philosophy has anything to do with the pursuit of wisdom by default, with wisdom already being something vague and irrelevant at the start unless by wisdom one means something like rationality or justice, in which case the word wisdom is not needed at all.  A truth is a part of reality no matter how "wise" it is or seems to be.  In fact, there are entire philosophical ideas that, if true, would entail that there is no such thing as wisdom (in most conceptions behind the word wisdom, that is), like nihilism--so the idea that philosophy is always about pursuing wisdom is asinine from the start for this reason as well!

Another side of this that needs to be addressed is the matter of what wisdom even is in the first place.  Some people use the word as if it refers to practicality, in which case there is nothing special about wisdom beyond personal convenience and wisdom is not about truth or morality at all.  Of course, truth is what grants something the sole justification it could have for being believed in the first place, and truth reduces down to logical necessities and deductions.  Wisdom does not have this kind of centrality to all things that reason and truth itself if it is not synonymous with them.

Yet wisdom is usually described as something beyond having knowledge and exercising consistency in one's worldview and actions.  However, when one distinguishes it from such things, it becomes unverifiable (how would one know something is "wise" as opposed to logically verifiable in the case of belief or consistent with a goal or worldview in the case of some course of action?).  Even the Bible, which does mention wisdom in a positive way, scarcely describes what it means, whereas it goes into great detail about how to treat other people and animals and how to regard God.  Wisdom is very clearly not a particularly high priority for the Christian God in his revelation to humanity in the way that metaphysics and moral obligations are.

Philosophy is simply not about wisdom at its core unless by wisdom one means something completely different from the normal usage of the word.  It is about truth, verifiability (without which one could not know truth), and how one lives in light of them.  Whether something is practical is secondary at best to metaphysics and epistemology because convenience and usefulness do not dictate the nature of reality.  Practicality might not even be what someone means by wisdom in the first place, either further distancing the concept of wisdom from mere truth and knowledge or reducing what they mean by the word down to some other concept that is ultimately not about wisdom at all.