Thank you, I welcome your reply and I hope, you aren't bothered by yet another response from me. I like debating very much. If you don't have the time for it, I would understand.

As I understand it, philosophy deals with the questions of existence and, for me personally, it is impossible to separate it from questions or attitudes to life and death. If philosophy has faith based dogmas as the basis of its reflections, which in turn are composed of practical habits and theoretical superstructure, philosophy I would describe as the child of religion, which answers the questions and issues raised by it by providing ongoing perspectives.

If religion is the mother - providing society with an order - the daughters and sons are the philosophers who push against certain aspects of the order and provide the peoples with their newly gained perspectives and questions. Therein often lays a risk to disturb the order in such a way that it can potentially shake it on the whole.

Philosophers like Sokrates challenged the religious order of his time, he did offend the current beliefs but he didn't question, for example, how bridges shall be constructed or how agriculture shall be maintained. It can be said that what he indeed questioned, were certain rules of the religion of his lifetime.

Today, philosophy is sometimes synonymous with a-religiosity.

This estranges me quite a bit. If you take the mother out completely and put the sons and daughters on their own, what are they supposed to distance themselves from, what are they supposed to question? In other words, if you separate religion from philosophy, there won't be much left of either, no? It's like removing the background from a picture and leaving only the foreground. But this would make the picture incomplete, as you would have robbed it of its perspective wholeness.

Or, there were only philosophers living their philosophy, there was no exegesis as such or as we understand it today. There were only philosopher living their philosophy, and most of them did not even write this down. If you could not practice your philosophy, that is, live your philosophy, it was not a worthy philosophy.

I have great difficulty with this description. How I see it, a philosophy cannot be lived by any individual if no one else lives it; it is then something that one could recognise as a peculiarity in a person's character, but nothing generally valid. It is impossible for me to think that at any time philosophers have lived as such in connection with their own philosophical outlook. In other words, they took something as a basis for practising it, as you say. But there could not have been such a practice if it had not been recognised by many others as worthy of practice, as I think. It is then a highly personal trait, I would say.

The only thing I can think of is the practice of philosophising in and of itself (hence, in general), where one person is in a living dialogue with another, practising the art of asking and answering questions, which I equate with "being a good philosopher", that is, not offering one's own theory of life and death per se, but rather seeking to fathom it in dialogue with a personal counterpart.

... In today's jargon, this would perhaps be described as an excellent interviewer who does not seek to put their interview guest on the defensive or on the offensive, but instead shows a genuine interest in their positive potential, i.e. has an inspiring effect on them - which then would water down their roles as "interviewer" and "guest" but let them become a couple in dialogue. Could it be, that it is this, what you mean?