We all, students and teachers alike, have feelings of misgiving at the start of a new academic year – one colleague of mine admitted to going home a couple of days ago and bursting into tears at the enormity of the challenge.

This is a good time to ask why we bother to study philosophy at all. Philosophy means “love of wisdom” and the Greeks had two concepts of wisdom which need to be distinguished – sophia and phronesis.

Sophia means intellectual skill or wisdom. It is the fruit of a lifetime of intellectual enquiry and the pursuit of knowledge and truth. So it is the fruit of biology, history, English or maths. We become a good mathematician by virtue of years of study and practice. We grow into intellectual excellence or Sophia as a result of years of education and of practice.

But the second form of wisdom, phronesis, is about how we live. It is a practical wisdom involved in reflecting on life and life’s experiences. When a lawyer rings me up after I’m involved in an accident and asks me to make up some injuries so that he or she can represent me and gain monetary compensation, I employ phronesis in answering, as I do when a friend urges me to go on drinking beyond sensible limits. Phronesis builds the moral character – it gives us spine and integrity.

For the goal of phronesis is human and communal flourishing. If I am to build into the wonderful gifted being we all are, capable of living beyond my apparent potential, if I am to build into a person of true distinction, morally and intellectually, I need to acquire the virtue of phronesis or practical wisdom – the wisdom of living well.

How much we need this wisdom in our strangely paradoxical culture, where our heroes may have little or no moral sense, where there are conflicting views of right and wrong, where it sometimes seems that the only good is that which is the means to an end (an end often defined by money).

Ask yourself this as we start a new term: is your truth and integrity really that which you own, or that which has been fed to you by the media, your peer group, or the distorted stories we tell ourselves which may distort our true perception?

Philosophy is the journey into the soul or psyche of humankind. And if today you feel afraid, uncertain, tired, lacking in hope, then start the journey now and travel a different way – towards love, justice, truth and hopefulness: towards the happy and fulfilled life of excellence.

Image is taken by the author at dawn looking south over Lake Windermere. The island in the mist is called Ling Holme and it’s where the ashes of my late brother are scattered.  We grew up on Lake Windermere and I often go back there to remember him and contemplate the next of life’s challenges. Best wishes to all of you for the new term.