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
that it is 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.
Philosophy studies such concepts as
existence,
goodness,
knowledge, and
beauty. It 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.
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,
Rene 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.
Originally the scope of philosophy was
all intellectual endeavors. It has long
since come to mean 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 long before
Plato.
As with any field of academic study,
philosophy has many subdisciplines. This is
mainly due to the fact that there tends to be
a "philosophy of" nearly everything else that
is studied.
Those new to philosophy are usually invited
particularly to pay attention to
logic,
metaphysics,
philosophy of mind,
philosophy of language,
epistemology,
philosophy of science,
ethics, and
political philosophy as--arguably, of
course--the "central disciplines" of
philosophy.
-
Aesthetics: the study of basic
philosophical questions about
art and
beauty. Sometimes
philosophy of art is used to describe
only questions about art, with "aesthetics"
the more general term. Likewise "aesthetics"
sometimes applied even more broadly than to
"philosophy of beauty":to the "sublime," to
humour, to the frightening--to any of the
responses we might expect works of art or
entertainment to elicit.
-
Axiology: the branch of philosophical
enquiry that explores
aesthetics and
ethics;
metaphysics and
epistemology round out what many
consider the three main branches from which
all philosophical discourse stems. (Logic is
sometimes included as another main branch,
sometimes as a separate science usually
worked on by philosophers, sometimes just as
a characteristically philosophical method
applying to all the others.)
-
Epistemology: the study of
knowledge, its nature,
possibility, and
justification
-
Ethics: the study of what makes actions
right or wrong, and of how theories of
right action[?] can be applied to
special moral problems. Subdisciplines
include
meta-ethics,
value theory,
theory of conduct, and
applied ethics.
-
History of philosophy: the study of what
philosophers up until recent times have
written, its interpretation, who influenced
whom, and so forth. The bulk of questions in
history of philosophy are interpretive
questions.
-
Logic: the study of the standards of
correct
argumentation. Includes
formal logic, such as
Aristotelian Syllogisms[?] and
propositional logic.
-
Meta-philosophy: the study of
philosophical method and the goals of
philosophy. The term "philosophy of
philosophy" is sometimes used more or less
as a synonym.
-
Metaphysics (which includes
ontology): the study of the most basic
categories of things, such as
existence,
objects,
properties,
causality, and so forth. Metaphysics
often is taken to include questions now
studied by other philosophical
subdisciplines, such as
the mind-body problem and
free will and determinism.
- Philosophy of biology[?]: the
philosophical study of some basic concepts
of biology, including the notion of a
species and whether biological concepts
are reducible to nonbiological concepts.
-
Philosophy of education: the study of
the purpose and most basic methods of
education or learning.
-
Philosophy of history: the study of the
methods by which history is derived and
accepted.
-
Philosophy of language: the study of the
concepts of
meaning and
truth.
-
Philosophy of mathematics: the study of
philosophical questions raised by
mathematics, such as, what numbers are, and
what the nature and origins of our
mathematical knowledge are.
-
Philosophy of mind: the philosophical
study of the nature of the
mind, and its relation to the
body and the rest of the world.
-
Philosophy of perception: the
philosophical study of topics related to
perception; the question what the "immediate
objects" of perception are has been
especially important.
-
Philosophy of physics: the philosophical
study of some basic concepts of physics,
including
space,
time, and
force.
-
Philosophy of psychology: the study of
some fundamental questions about the methods
and concepts of psychology and psychiatry,
such as the meaningfulness of
Freudian concepts; this is sometimes
treated as including philosophy of mind.
-
Philosophy of religion: the study of the
meaning of the concept of
God and of the rationality of belief in
the existence of God.
-
Philosophy of science: includes not
only, as subdisciplines, the "philosophies
of" the special sciences (i.e., physics,
biology, etc.), but also questions about
induction,
scientific method, scientific progress,
etc.
- Philosophy of social sciences[?]: the
philosophical study of some basic concepts,
methods, and presuppositions of social
sciences such as sociology and economics.
-
Political philosophy: the study of basic
topics concerning
government, including the purpose of
the state, political
justice,
political freedom[?], the nature of law,
and
the justification of punishment[?].
-
Value theory: the study of the concept
value. Also called
theory of value. Sometimes this is taken
to be equivalent to
axiology (a term not in as much currency
in the English-speaking world as it once
was), and sometimes is taken to be, instead
of a foundational field, an overarching
field including ethics, aesthetics, and
political philosophy, i.e., the
philosophical subdisciplines that crucially
depend on questions of value.
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.
Philosophy has applications. The most
obvious applications are those in
ethics--applied
ethics in particular--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.
Natural Science: Many of
the natural sciences historically developed as
offshoots of philosophy. This reflects an
older division of subject matters in general:
originally the scope of philosophy was all
intellectual endeavour. Aristotle did what
would now be called biology, meterology,
physics, and cosmology, alongside his
metaphysics and ethics. Even in the eighteenth
century physics and chemistry were still
classified as
natural philosophy[?] (that is, the
philosophical study of nature). Psychology,
economics, sociology, and linguistics were
once the domain of philosophers insofar as
they were studied at all, but now have only a
weaker connection with the field. In the late
twentieth century cognitive science and
artificial intelligence could be seen as being
forged in part out of "philosophy of mind."
In general, once a branch of philosophy
begins to be prosecuted by its own
specialists, using distinct rigorous,
agreed-upon methods of observation and
experimentation, philosophers of a more
general stripe find less and less to
contribute to it. The scope of philosophy has
gotten smaller and smaller, then, as different
sciences have spun off and become independent
disciplines in their own right. Philosophy has
been closely related to science, then; but
philosophers disagree about whether it
essentially ought to be.
Traditionally philosophers have held that
philosophers must use basically different
methods from science, or only very specially
refined versions of those methods: philosophy
is done
a priori, does not rely on
experiment, and must be able to justify
the methods science without depending on them
It aslo depends on non-scientific methods,
such as
interpretation[?]. But many nowadays hold
that philosophy is very close to science in
its character and method;
Analytic philosophy often urged that
philosophers should emulate the methods of
natural science;
Quine later claimed that philosophy just
is a branch of natural science, simply the
most abstract one. This approach, common
nowadays, is called "philosophical
naturalism[?]"
Philosophers have always devoted some study
to science and the scientific method, and to
logic, and this involves, indirectly, studying
the subject matters of those sciences. Whether
philosophy also has its own, distinct subject
matter is a contentious point. Traditionally
ethics,
aesthetics, and
metaphysics have all been philosophical
subjects, but many philosophers have,
especially in the twentieth century, rejected
these as futile questions (the
Vienna Circle). Philosophy has also
concerned itself with explaining the
foundations and character knowledge in general
(of science, or history), and in this case it
would be a sort of "science of science" but
some now hold that this cannot consist in any
more than clarifying the arguments and claims
of other sciences. This suggests that
philosophy might be the study of meaning and
reasoning generally; but some still would
claim either that htis is not a science, or
that if it is it ought not to be prsued by
philosophers.
All these views have something in common:
whatever philosophy essentially is or is
concerned with, it tends on the whole to
proceed more "abstractly" than most (or most
other) natural sciences. It does not depend as
much on experience and experiment, and does
not contribute as directly to technology. It
clearly would be a mistake to identify
philosophy with any one natural science;
whether it can be identified with science very
broadly construed is still an open question.
Philosophy of Science:
Philosophy of science is an active
discipline pursued by both trained
philosophers and scientists. Philosophers
often refer to, and interpret,
experimental work of various kinds (as in
philosophy of physics and philosophy of
psychology). But this is not surprising: such
branches of philosophy aim at philosophical
understanding of experimental work.
It is not the philosophers in their capacity
as philosophers, who perform the
experiments and formulate the scientific
theories under study. Philosophy of science
should not be confused with science it studies
any more than biology should be confused with
plants and animals.
Theology and Religious studies:
Like philosophy, most religious studies, are
not experimental. Parts of theology, including
questions about the existence and nature of
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. So the two
are not unrelated. But other part of religious
studies, such as the comparison of different
world religions, can be easily distinguished
from philosophy in just the way that any other
social science can be distinguished from
philosophy. These are closer to history and
sociology, and involve specific observations
of particular phenomena, here particular
religious practices.
Nowadays religion plays a very marginal
role in philosophy. The
Empiricist tradition in modern philosophy
often held that religious questions are beyond
the scope of human knowledge, and many have
claimed that religious language is literally
meaningless: there are not even questions to
be answered. Some philosophers have felt that
these difficulties in evidence were
irrelevant, and have argued for, against, or
just about religious beliefs on moral or other
grounds. Nonetheless, in the main stream of
twentieth century philosophy there are very
few philosophers who give serious
consideration to religious questions.
Mathematics:
Mathematics uses very specific, rigorous
methods of proof that philosophers sometimes
(only rarely) try to emulate. Most philosophy
is written in ordinary prose, and while it
strives to be precise it does not usually
attain anything like mathematical clarity. As
a result, mathematicians hardly ever disagree
about results, while philosophers of course do
disagree about their results, as well as their
methods.
Of course "philosophy
of mathematics" is a branch of
philosophy of science; but in many ways
mathematics has a special relationship to
philosophy. This is because the study of
logic,of reasoning, has itself has
traditionally been considered a central branch
of philosophy, and mathematics is the most
rigorous, rule governed kind of argument known
to most people, and has always been taken as a
paradigm example of logic. In the late
ninteenth and twentieth centuries logic made
great advances, and mathematics has been
proven to be reducible to logic (at least, to
first-order logic with some
set theory). The use of formal,
mathematical logic in philosophy now resembles
the use of math in science, although it is not
as frequent.
So philosophy, it seems, 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.
"Science is what we know and philosophy
is what we don't know."
- --Bertrand
Russell
"What is your aim in philosophy? To
show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle."
- --Ludwig
Wittgenstein
"Philosophy, n. A route of many roads
leading from nowhere to nothing."
- --Ambrose
Bierce
Further categorization is needed here
altruism --
anti-realism --
Aristotelianism[?] --
Buddhist philosophy --
conceptualism[?] --
coherentism[?] --
Confucianism --
Conscience --
consequentialism --
constructivism --
deconstructionism--
determinism --
egoism --
empiricism --
empiricist philosophy[?] --
epicureanism --
eudaimonism[?] --
existentialism --
existentialist philosophy[?] --
foundationalism --
formalism[?] --
hedonism --
historical materialism --
historicism --
idealism --
intuitionism --
Irrationalism and Aestheticism --
irrealism --
knowledge --
logical positivism --
materialism --
mechanism[?] --
mentalism[?] --
memetics --
naive realism[?] --
nominalism --
nondualism --
operationalism[?] --
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 --
traditionalism --
Transcendentalism --
utilitarianism --
Vedic --
vitalism --
causation --
evidence and theory[?] --
nature of experimentation[?] --
faith and rationality --
free will and determinism --
induction and probability[?] --
nature of (scientific, natural) laws[?] --
the problem of other minds --
problem of the criterion --
scientific explanation[?] --
the reality of theoretical entities[?] --
the reality of unobservables[?] --
technology and science[?] --
validity of the social sciences[?] --
Critical Theory --
Existentialism --
American Pragmatism[?] --
British Empiricism[?] --
French materialism --
German idealism --
nativism --
See also:
