levite

I would actually say that it is the process of investigating meaning and/or purpose in things.

Or, as one of my profs in college used to say: "Philosophy is the process of spending seven years in college and grad school, breaking your balls to try and figure out how a bunch of guys whom nobody understood when alive thought, only to get your degrees, and then break your balls trying to find someone who's willing to pay you to think for a living."

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)