Philosophy

Philosophy, both the field and the concept, is notoriously hard to define. Very roughly, we might say it is the study of, or wise reflection about, very general things. To elaborate, we might say that philosophy 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 dialectic about all of the above. Philosophy studies a huge range of general concepts, such as existence, goodness, knowledge, and beauty. It asks questions such as "What is the good life?" and "Is knowledge even possible?" Some famous philosophers include Plato, Aristotle, Rene Descartes, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant. The thinking of these writers, and the subject they helped to create, is notoriously difficult to understand.

One good way to understand the concept of philosophy is to examine its historical development. The Greek word was philosophia (φιλοσοφία), meaning "love of wisdom." ("Philo-" comes from the Greek word philein, meaning to love, and "-sophy" comes from the sophia, or wisdom.) Originally the scope of philosophy included all fields of study, other than history; as recently as the nineteenth century, what we now call "science" was called "natural philosophy." In the last two centuries in particular, "philosophy" has come to mean an especially abstract, nonexperimental intellectual endeavor.

Whatever historical observations we might make, in fact, "philosophy" has proven to be a notoriously difficult word to define; the question "What is philosophy?" is itself, famously, a vexing philosophical question. It is often observed that philosophers are unique in the extent to which they disagree about what their field even is.

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.

History of philosophy

Philosophy has a long history. Generally, philosophers divide the history of Western philosophy into ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, modern philosophy, and contemporary philosophy. Ancient philosophy was dominated by the trio of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. In medieval philosophy, topics in metaphysics and philosophy of religion held sway, and the most important names included Augustine, Peter Abelard and Aquinas. Modern philosophy, generally means philosophy from 1600 until about 1900, and which includes many distinguished early modern philosophers, such as René Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. Nineteenth-century philosophy is often treated as its own period, as it was dominated by post-Kantian German and idealist philosophers like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and F. H. Bradley; two other important thinkers were John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche.

In the twentieth century, philosophers in Europe and the United States took diverging paths. The so-called analytic philosophers, including Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, were centered in Oxford and Cambridge, and were joined by logical empiricists emigrating from Austria and Germany (e.g., Rudolph Carnap) and their students and others in the United States (e.g., W. V. Quine) and other English-speaking countries.

On the continent of Europe (especially Germany and France), the phenomenologist Germans Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger led the way, followed soon by Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialists; this led via other "isms" to postmodernism, which dominates schools of Critical Theory as well as philosophy departments in France and Germany.

Please see our more exhaustive list of philosophers as well as the history of philosophy article, from which the above was taken.

Philosophical subdisciplines

As with any field of academic study, philosophy has a number of subdisciplines. Philosophy in fact seems to have a huge number of subdisciplines, in no small part due to the fact that there tends to be a "philosophy of" nearly everything else that is studied. The beginner is 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.
• 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 dead philosophers have written, its interpretation, and who influenced whom.
• Logic: the study of the standards of correct argumentation.
• Meta-philosophy: the study of philosophical method and the goals of philosophy.
• Metaphysics: the study of the most basic categories of things, such as existence, objects, properties, causality, and so forth.
• Philosophy of biology: the philosophical study of some basic concepts of biology, including the notion of a species.
• Philosophy of education: the study of the purpose and most basic methods of education or learning.
• Philosophy of language: the study of the concepts of meaning and truth.
• Philosophy of mind: the 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, especially the question what the "immediate objects" of perception are.
• 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 philosophical study of questions about societies and social interaction, including the nature and justification of the state, justice, freedom, law, and punishment.

There are quite a few others; feel free to complete the list.

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. 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.

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, and John Stuart Mill 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.

Philosophical theories

altruism -- anti-realism -- Buddhist philosophy -- coherentism -- Confucianism -- consequentialism -- constructivism -- deconstructionism -- egoism -- eudaimonism -- foundationalism -- hedonism -- historical materialism -- irrealism -- justified true belief -- nominalism -- Objectivism -- psychological egoism -- Platonism -- realism -- reliabilism -- Taoism -- Transcendentalism utilitarianism -- Populism and Nationalism -- Irrationalism and Aestheticism -- Stoicism -- [etc. continue the list please]

This article was taken from a very early version of the Wikipedia article about philosophy. Current version.