Philosophy





Philosophy means 'love of wisdom'. It is the study of thought, and also the
study of the meaning and justification of beliefs about the most general, or
universal, aspects of reality. It is a study which is carried out, as is
science, by careful observation, analysis, and experimentation. But
philosophy is concerned with aspects of existence which may expand beyond
the physical facts, natural laws, and potential manipulations of matter and
energy. Philosophy investigates the general questions of life, and also
specific investigations into topics such as perception, selfhood, morals,
and "the nature of reality."

Philosophy is more than just idle speculation. A philosopher frames a
problem in a logical manner then proceeds to a solution based on logical
processes and reasoning (from the known facts to the potential realities).
Philosophy is concerned with what actually exists or may be done, and is
ultimately dependant on science to confirm its logical speculations.

However, philosophy often deals with subjects which are too speculative,
general, subjective, or unsuited to scientific investigation. Many believe
that philosophy is the vanguard of science - a subject explored in the
philosophy of science. A philosopher can look for solutions to problems that
science may be thousands of years away from solving. Philosophy is just as
rigorous as physical science when it comes to investigating. However, it is
often treated with less rigor than mathematics and logic.

It proceeds by formulating problems carefully based on all known facts, and
proceeding to logically offer solutions to them, giving arguments for the
solutions, and engaging in a dialectical process to discern the truth; this
is the method of science without so much dependence on physical
experimentation. Just as science proceeds by observation, formulation of a
hypothesis, and further experimentation, so philosophy proceeds by logical
formulation of a problem, argument for a solution, and counter-argument.
These processes proceed until a solution is reached. Philosophy has
developed more slowly than other sciences because it is solely dependent on
cognitive integrity. Science has more experimental evidence at its disposal
than does Philosophy.

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.

Western and Eastern Philosophy

Members of many societies around the world have considered the 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. In the West, the term "eastern
philosophy" broadly subsumes the philosophic traditions of Asia and the East.

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.

Eastern Philosophy

Famous Eastern philosophers include Gautama Buddha, Bodhidharma, Lao Zi,
Confucius, Zhuang Zi, and more recently, Mao Zedong and Meher Baba. This
article deals primarily with the Western philosophic tradition; for more
information on Eastern philosophies, see Eastern philosophy.

In general

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.

Origins

To start with, "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, who
were important in Athenian democracy. Some of the first sophists were what
we would now call philosophers. In Plato's dialogues, Socrates often
contrasts Philosophers (those who love wisdom) with Sophists, those Socrates
characterised as dishonest for hiding their ignorance behind word play and
flattery, and convincing others of what was baseless or untrue. "Sophist" to
this day is a derogatory term for one who persuades rather than reasons.

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.

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.

Philosophical subdisciplines

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.

   * Axiology: the branch of philosophical enquiry that explores:
        o 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.
        o 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.

   * Epistemology: the study of knowledge and it's nature, possibility, and
     justification.
   * 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:
        o 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. Also see
          biosophy.
        o Education: the study of the purpose and most basic methods of
          education or learning.
        o History: the study of the methods by which history is derived and
          accepted.
        o Language: the study of the concepts of meaning and truth.
        o 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.
        o Mind: the philosophical study of the nature of the mind, and its
          relation to the body and the rest of the world.
        o Perception: the philosophical study of topics related to
          perception; the question what the "immediate objects" of
          perception are has been especially important.
        o Physics: the philosophical study of some basic concepts of
          physics, including space, time, and force.
        o 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.
        o Religion: the study of the meaning of the concept of God and of
          the rationality of belief in the existence of God.
        o 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.
        o 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, the justification of punishment, and
     paternalism.
   * 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.

Axiology, metaphysics and epistemology are 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.

How to get 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.

Those who are new to the subject of philosophy are advised to study logic,
metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology,
philosophy of science, ethics, and political philosophy as these are -
arguably - the central disciplines.

Applied philosophy

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.

Philosophy contrasted with other disciplines

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
also 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 this is not a science, or that if it is it ought not to be
pursued 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

This 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

Math 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 nineteenth 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.

Some tentative generalizations about what philosophy is

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.

Quotes

"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