Philosophy

Raphael, School of Athens, (Greek philosophers)
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The question of how to define philosophy is one that is philosophical in its own right. For the purpose of introducing the concept, we can say it has historically been the study of the meaning and justification of beliefs about the most general, or universal, aspects of things – a study which is carried out, not by experimentation or careful observation, but instead typically by formulating problems carefully, offering solutions to them, giving arguments for the solutions, and engaging in the dialectic about all of the above. A Philosopher studies such concepts as existence, goodness, knowledge, and beauty, and asks questions such as "What is goodness, in general?" and "Is knowledge even possible?". In general terms philosophy is the critical, speculative or analytical study of the exterior or interior in addition to reflective study on the method of studying such topics.

Getting Started in Philosophy

It is a platitude (at least among people who write introductions to philosophy) that everybody has a philosophy, though they might not all realize it or be able to defend it. But at the same time the word "philosophy" as it is used by philosophers is nothing like what is meant by people who say "Here's my philosophy (of life,etc.): . . ." Such is the tension between pedagogy and scholarship.

If you're already interested in studying philosophy, your reason might be to improve the way you live or think somehow, or you simply wish to get acquainted with one of the most ancient areas of human thought. On the other hand, if you don't see what all the fuss is about, it might help to read the motivation to philosophize, which explains what motivates many people to "do philosophy," and get an introduction to philosophical method, which is important to understanding how philosophers think. It might also help to acquaint yourself with some considerations about just what philosophy is.

What Is Philosophy?

So, philosophy is a discipline that draws on knowledge that the average educated person has, and it does not make use of experimentation and careful observation, though it may interpret philosophical aspects of experiment and observation. More positively, one might say that philosophy is a discipline that examines the meaning and justification of certain of our most basic, fundamental beliefs, according to a loose set of general methods. But what we might mean by the words "basic, fundamental beliefs"?

A belief is fundamental if it concerns those aspects of the universe which are most commonly found, which are found everywhere: the universal aspects of things. Philosophy studies, for example, what existence itself is. It also studies value--the goodness of things--in general. Surely in human life we find the relevance of value or goodness everywhere, not just moral goodness, though that might be very important, but even more generally, goodness in the sense of anything that is actually desirable, the sense, for example, in which an apple, a painting, and a person can all be good. (If indeed there is a single sense in which they are all called "good.")

Of course, physics and the other sciences study some very universal aspects of things; but it does so experimentally. Philosophy studies those aspects that can be studied without experimentation. Those are aspects of things that are very general indeed; to take yet another example, philosophers ask what physical objects as such are, as distinguished from properties of objects and relations between objects, and perhaps also as distinguished from minds or souls. Physicists proceed as though the notion of a physical body is quite clear and straightforward--which perhaps in the end it will found to be--but at any rate, physics assumes that, and then asks questions about how all physical bodies behave, and then does experiments to find out the answers.

Members of many societies around the world have considered these same questions, and built philosophic traditions based upon each other's works. Philosophy may be broadly divided into various realms based loosely on geography. The term "philosophy" alone in a Euro-American academic context usually refers to the philosophic traditions of Western civilization, sometimes also called Western philosophy. The Western philosophic tradition began with the Greeks and continues to the present day. Famous Western philosophers include Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

In the West, the term "eastern philosophy" broadly subsumes the philosophic traditions of Asia and the East. Famous Eastern philosophers include Gautama Buddha, Bodhidharma, Lao Zi, Confucius, Zhuang Zi, and Mao Zedong. This article deals primarily with the Western philosophic tradition; for more information on Eastern philosophies, see Eastern philosophy.

Popularly, the word "philosophy" is often used to mean any form of wisdom, or any person's perspective on life (as in "philosophy of life") or basic principles behind or method of achieving something (as in "my philosophy about driving on highways"). That is different from the academic meaning, and it is the academic meaning which is used here. Originally, "philosophy" meant simply "the love of wisdom." "Philo-" comes from the Greek word philein, meaning to love, and "-sophy" comes from the Greek sophia, or wisdom. "Philosopher" replaced the word "sophist" (from sophoi), which was used to describe "wise men," teachers of rhetoric, which were important in Athenian democracy. Some of the first sophists were what we would now call philosophers.

Historically, the scope of philosophy covered all intellectual endeavors. It has since come to cover only the study of an especially abstract, nonexperimental intellectual endeavor. In fact, and as was mentioned at the opening of this article, philosophy is a notoriously difficult word to define and the question "What is philosophy?" is a vexed philosophical question. It is often observed that philosophers are unique in the extent to which they disagree about what their field even is.

(The introduction of the term "philosophy" was ascribed to the Greek thinker Pythagoras (see Diogenes Laertius: "De vita et moribus philosophorum", I, 12; Cicero: "Tusculanae disputationes", V, 8-9). This ascription is certainly based on a passage in a lost work of Herakleides Pontikos, a disciple of Aristotle. It is considered to be part of the widespread Pythagoras legends of this time. In fact the term "philosophy" was not in use before Plato.)

Philosophy's Branches and Subdisciplines

As with any field of academic study, philosophy has many subdisciplines, but few fields are as vast as philosophy. Generally, the subdisciplines can be organized under the major branches below, much as Aristotle divided philosophy originally. There is now a philosphical subdiscipline for nearly all other major fields of study, and most are concerned with the interpretations of those fields.

• Aesthetics
  The axiological study of basic philosophical questions about art and beauty, as well as art history, sometimes called the philosophy of art, and closely associated with value theory; bridging with epistemology are questions in the philosophy of perception and philosophy of language.

• Epistemology
  The theory and study of knowledge, consciousness, and intelligence, including the the mind-body problem in the philosophy of mind, including the philosophy of perception and philosophy of language; bridging with logic and metaphysics is the philosophy of science, with questions about the philosophy of psychology and other social sciences, and artificial intelligence.

• Ethics
  The axiological study of moral problems, including right action, meta-ethics, value theory, theory of conduct, bioethics, applied ethics; political philosophy, which is concerned with justice and punishment, human rights, and the role of the state or Government; bridging with metaphysics is the philosophy of religion, studying the rationality of faith.

• Logic
  The study of meaning and truth through argumentation, deduction, induction and reasoning, including propositional logic and computation; the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mathematics; bridging with epistemology and metaphysics and is the philosophy of science, concerned with problems of induction, scientific method and progress.

• Metaphysics
  The study of the most basic categories of things in ontology and teleology, such as existence, objects, properties and causality, including free will and determinism; bridging with logic and epistemology is the philosophy of science, including the philosophy of physics, concerned with physical laws, space, time, and force, the philosophy of biology and other sciences like analytical chemistry and cosmology; the philosophy of religion, which studies the meaning of the concept of God and of the rationality of faith.

• The History of Philosophy
  The study of what philosophers have written, their interpretations and influences; Meta-philosophy: the study of philosophical method and the goals of philosophy; philosophy of history; philosophy of education, and other issues linking with history and value.

Philosophy and other Disciplines

Science: Many of the natural sciences historically developed as branches of philosophy, reflecting ancient attitudes that philosophy covered the whole of intellectual endeavours. Aristotle practiced what would now be called biology, meterology, physics, and cosmology, alongside his metaphysics and ethics. As recent as the eighteenth century physics and chemistry were still classified as natural philosophy, the philosophical study of nature. Psychology, economics, sociology, and linguistics all owe their existence to philosophy, and more recently, cognitive science and artificial intelligence have been forged out of the philosophy of mind.

Philosophy is done a priori, and in prose form does not rely on experiment. Philosphy justifies the methods of science without depending on them, and also depends upon non-scientific methods, such as interpretation. Analytic philosophy adherents often urged philosophers to emulate the methods of natural science, and Quine claimed philosophy was a branch of natural science, the most abstract branch, and aproach now called "philosophical naturalism". Philosophers have always devoted study to the sciences and logic. Philosophy is concerned with explaining the foundations and character knowledge in general, in science or history, thus philosophy of science was branched as an active discipline from logic and metaphysics, pursued by trained philosophers and scientists. Some areas of the philosophy of science aim to fully understand experimental work in terms of the larger metaphysical questions, rather than show scientists how to conduct those experiments.

Mathematics: Mathematics uses a very specific set of rigorous methods of proof based on the rules of logic. Most philosophy is written in ordinary, if obtuse, prose, and while it strives to be precise it does not usually attain anything like logical and mathematical clarity. As a result, mathematicians rarely disagree about their results, while philosophers do indeed disagree about theirs, as well as the methods used to attain those results.

The philosophy of mathematics" is another branch of the philosophy of science, but in many ways, mathematics has a special relationship with philosophy. This is directly due to the position of logic, of reasoning, which has traditionally been considered a major branch of philosophy. Mathematics is a most rigorous, rule-governed type of logic, and has always been cited as the paradigmatic example of what logic can do. In the late ninteenth and twentieth centuries, logic made great advances, and mathematics was proven reducible to logic, in terms of first-order logic and set theory. The use of formal, mathematical logic in philosophy now closely resembles the use of math in science, and attracts a very different philosopher than in ethics or aesthetics.

Theology and Religious Studies: Like much of philosophy, religious studies are not experimental. Parts of theology, including questions about the existence and nature of god or gods, clearly overlap with philosophy of religion. Aristotle considered theology a branch of metaphysics, the central field of philosophy, and most philosophers prior to the twentieth century have devoted significant effort to theological questions. Yet, other part of religious studies, such as the comparison of different world religions, can be easily distinguished from philosophy in just the way that the social sciences can be distinguished from philosophy. These are closer to history and sociology, and involve specific observations of particular phenomena. In theology, particular religious practices are the focus.

Religion now plays a more marginal role in philosophy, and both empiricists and rationalists in modern philosophy often held that religious questions were beyond the scope of human knowledge. Many have claimed religious language is itself literally meaningless, questions which cannot be answered. Some philosophers have argued these difficulties are evidence that religious beliefs are are closely related to moral and ethical questions, while others have argued the two were very separate.

Applications of Philosophy

Philosophy has applications. The most obvious applications are those in ethics, applied ethics, or bioethics, and in political philosophy. The political philosophies of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls have shaped and been used to justify governments and their actions. Philosophy of education deserves special mention, as well; progressive education as championed by John Dewey has had a profound impact on educational practices in the United States in the twentieth century.

Other important, but less immediate applications can be found in epistemology, which might help one to regulate one's notions of what knowledge, evidence, and justified belief are. Philosophy of science discusses the underpinnings of the scientific method, among other topics sometimes useful to scientists. Aesthetics can help to interpret discussions of art. Even ontology, surely the most abstract and least practical-seeming branch of philosophy, has had important consequences for logic and computer science. In general, the various "philosophies of," such as philosophy of law, can provide workers in their respective fields with a deeper understanding of the theoretical or conceptual underpinnings of their fields. Moreover, recently, there has been developing a burgeoning profession devoted to applying philosophy to the problems of ordinary life: philosophical counseling.

Some Philosophical Theories and Movements

altruism -- anti-realism -- aristotelianism -- buddhist philosophy -- coherentism -- confucianism -- Conscience -- consequentialism -- constructivism -- deconstruction-- determinism -- dialectical materialism -- dualism -- egoism -- empiricism -- epicureanism -- eudaimonism -- existentialism -- foundationalism -- formalism -- hedonism -- historical materialism -- historicism -- idealism -- intuitionism -- Irrationalism and Aestheticism -- irrealism -- knowledge -- logical positivism -- materialism -- mechanism -- mentalism -- memetics -- naive realism -- nominalism -- philosophical naturalism -- philosophical pessimism -- physicalism -- platonism -- populism and nationalism -- pragmatism -- probabilism -- psychological egoism -- rationalism -- realism -- reality enforcement -- relativism -- reliabilism -- stoicism -- subjectivism -- scholasticism -- sensationalism -- sensualism -- solipsism -- taoism -- teleology -- transcendentalism -- utilitarianism -- vedic -- vitalism

Philosophy of Science Connections
causation -- evidence and theory -- nature of experimentation -- faith and rationality -- free will and determinism -- induction and probability -- nature of scientific and natural laws -- the problem of other minds -- the problem of criterion -- scientific explanation -- the reality of theoretical entities -- the reality of unobservables -- technology and science -- validity of the social sciences

Further Reading

• History of philosophy
• List of philosophical topics
• Definition of Philosopher
• List of Philosophers
• Pseudophilosophy

External Links

• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

References

• Adapted from the Wikpedia article, "Philosophy" www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy July 16, 2003