The word “philosophy” comes from ancient Greece, and it originally meant “the love (philos) of wisdom (sophia)”. It did not take long for the word to be associated more generally with the “search for truth”; however, philosophers are not the only ones searching for the truth. They were not even the first. The first were the poets, whose method of searching for the truth was to explain the world around them in terms of the interaction between gods and men (that’s a gross oversimplification, but close enough for our purposes). For example, the poet Aristophanes attempted to explain love as the eternal search for one’s soul mate from which you were separated before birth by the gods as a punishment for the ambition of your ancestors. It was not long after the invention of writing that another method for searching for the truth was discovered: Mathematics. Mathematics is unmatched for its accuracy and precision in the search for truth, but unfortunately it is rather limited to the number of things it can investigate. For example, it can tell you the exact distance between two points on the earth, but can’t even begin to talk about what love is.

Anyway, philosophy is the search for truth, but one of many, and each type of search is distinguished by its methods. So a “philosopher” is not simply someone who is searching for the truth, but rather someone who searches for the truth using the methods of philosophy. It is really quite difficult to say what that method is. Like mathematics, philosophy uses logic, but it is a slightly different kind of logic (for example, “induction” is a type of proof in mathematical logic, but not in philosophical logic). Philosophy also uses rhetoric, just like the poets did, but it uses rhetoric for a very different purpose then the poets did. Regardless, you don’t need to be taught the method in order to become a philosopher (if that were a requirement, there would never have been a first philosopher) but being taught certainly makes it easier.

My advice, if you want to be a philosopher, is to read a lot of books that were written by philosophers who succeeded in making significant contributions to the field of philosophy. This would include: Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche and dozens of others. Actually, anything on the curriculum at St. John’s College or published in Britannica’s “Great Books” collection would be excellent. Through the course of reading these books, you will discover for yourself the finer details of what philosophy is and how to be a philosopher. But more importantly, you will also discover wonderfully fascinating things about yourself and the world around you.

What sparks a person to explore is ‘curiosity’, philosophers are curious by nature. You want answers, you want to understand, simply, find out – How? Where? Why?

Philosophy is nothing more than ‘curiosity’ as it is our curiosity that compels us to seek answers. No one is born a philosopher & no one can learn to be a philosopher.

You cannot philosophize anymore than I can fly a jet; unless you have been trained.

M. Heidegger said its like learning to be a woodworker.
The wood must be learned.