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