The definition of philosophy is a philosophical question in its own right. But for purposes 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?" Famous philosophers include Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant.
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.
Philosophers divide the long 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 Duns Scotus, 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, Thomas Hobbes, 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 G. W. F Hegel, Karl Marx, and F. H. Bradley; other important thinkers were John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard.
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 (for example, Rudolf Carnap) and their students and others in the United States (such as, W. V. Quine, Donald Davidson, and Saul Kripke, and other English-speaking countries (for example, A. J. Ayer).
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, which continue the projects that these philosophers have pursued.
Please see our more exhaustive list of philosophers as well as the history of philosophy article, from which the above was taken.
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. 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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, 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 vs. natural science
On the view of some in the (loosely described) Anglo-American philosophical tradition and the closely-related tradition of the Vienna Circle, philosophy ought to emulate the exact methods of science and mathematics. But strictly speaking, philosophy is to be distinguished from science. It is not, at least, part of philosophy to do experiments. Experiments play little, if any, role in the solution of philosophical problems. Someone might object to this, if they knew much about the intersection of philosophy and science. Philosophers are often referring to and interpreting the scientific work of physicists, who do experiments about space and time and quantum mechanics (see philosophy of physics). They are often referring to experimental work done in psychology when they discuss philosophy of psychology (see philosophy of psychology). In general, many philosophers who study philosophy of science are trained scientists.
There is no doubting that philosophers sometimes interpret and refer to experimental work of various kinds--especially in the philosophies of the so-called "special sciences," as in philosophy of physics and philosophy of psychology. But this is not surprising: the purpose of those branches of philosophy, branches like philosophy of physics, is to help interpret the philosophical aspects of experimental work. It is not the philosophers, in their capacities as philosophers, who do the experiments and who formulate explanatory theories of experimentally-tabulated facts.
There is a basic historical reason why philosophy is not experimental. Originally, the scope of philosophy was all abstract intellectual endeavor. Even up to early modern times, the people we now call "scientists" were referred to as "natural philosophers," i.e., philosophers who study nature. Over the years--it is very commonly observed--the scope of philosophy has gotten smaller and smaller, as different sciences have spun off and become independent disciplines in their own right. Some relatively early "spin-offs" were physics and chemistry; more recently, psychology has spun off.
One might wonder why scholars began to treat various special sciences as independent from philosophy. The answer for any given branched-off science is that it began to be prosecuted using rigorous, agreed-upon methods of observation and experimentation. Philosophy in its core sense, the sense that remains today, is essentially something that one should be able to do from one’s armchair, surrounded, at most, by some books and articles that scientists (but certainly other philosophers) write.
Of course, philosophy is far from being totally non-observational or non-empirical. Certainly philosophy makes essential use of observations about the world. But they are, we might say, very general observations, observations like "It seems to me I make free choices" and "It seems to me that killing another person, if ever necessary, requires a really good excuse." Observations like this can require careful attention. But most (not all) philosophical topics require no more specialized knowledge than the average educated person has, except for specialized knowledge about philosophy itself (such as philosophical jargon).
Some beginners confuse philosophy and psychology, yet these are different fields. Philosophy does study the mind, just as psychology does, but it also studies other things besides the mind, too, about which psychology has nothing to say. The ways philosophers and psychologists study the mind differ, as well. The study of the mind involved in doing psychology involves careful, specific observation of particular mental phenomena, and experimentation; by contrast, philosophers think about more general aspects of the mind, questions like, "What is consciousness?" and "What is the relation between mind and body?"
Philosophy vs. religious studies and classics
What distinguishes philosophy from religious studies, most of which also is not experimental? Parts of theology, those which ask about what God is and how to prove that God exists, clearly overlap with what philosophers call "philosophy of religion." That is not a problem. Similarly, classics, or study of ancient Greece and Rome, studies the Greek philosophers Socrates and Plato, and so classics overlaps with an area of philosophy, namely history of Greek philosophy, to that extent. That is not a problem either. Neither of these overlaps muddies the concepts of philosophy, of religious studies, or of classics.
But consider that other part of religious studies, the empirical part, which often focuses on comparative study of different world religions. That part of religious studies can be distinguished from philosophy in just the way that any other social science can be distinguished from philosophy. Namely, it involves specific observations of particular phenomena, here particular religious practices, and philosophy does not.
Philosophy vs. mathematics
Mathematics differs from philosophy for other reasons. It uses some very specific, rigorous methods of proof that philosophers sometimes (only rarely) try to emulate, but rarely, if ever, duplicate with the same degree of rigor. As a result, mathematicians hardly ever disagree about results, while philosophers of course do disagree about theirs. Besides, most philosophers do not even try to make their work rigorous in a mathematical sense. Unlike mathematicians, philosophers disagree about their methods, and their methodological differences can often be used account for their different conclusions.
Another way to distinguish philosophy from mathematics is this. Math, beyond a certain basic level, requires some extremely specialized knowledge, which can be obtained only by dint of extremely hard labor and concentration. It is not the sort of discipline that can be pursued with the knowledge that the average educated person has. Philosophy usually does require hard labor and concentration, but at least a philosopher can often explain his question, without too much difficulty, to an intelligent nonphilosopher in under ten minutes.
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.
Eventually, we would like the following lists introduced properly as separate sections of this article (which is an article-in-progress, of course!).
altruism -- anti-realism -- Buddhist philosophy -- coherentism -- Confucianism -- Conscience -- consequentialism -- constructivism -- deconstructionism-- Discordianism -- egoism -- eudaimonism -- foundationalism -- hedonism -- historical materialism -- historicism -- idealism -- irrealism -- justified true belief -- logical positivism -- nominalism -- nondualism -- Objectivism -- philosophical pessimism -- psychological egoism -- Platonism -- rationalism -- realism -- reality enforcement -- reliabilism -- Taoism -- Transcendentalism -- utilitarianism -- Populism and Nationalism -- Irrationalism and Aestheticism -- Stoicism -- Vedic -- Epicureanism -- [etc. continue the list please]
- A long list of unsorted terms culled from existentialism article -- please sort, arrange, remove duplicates
Absurd aesthetic Aristotelianism conceptualism Confucianism Daoism deconstructionism determinism emic empiricism empiricist philosophy etic existentialism existentialist philosophy formalism idealism intuitionism logicism materialism mechanism mentalism naive realism nativism naturalism nominalism operationalism physicalism Platonism pragmatism probabilism realism relativism scholasticism semiotics sensationalism sensualism solipsism Stoicism subjectivism Taoism teleology traditionalism vitalism
free will and determinism -- faith and rationality -- the problem of other minds -- problem of the criterion
French materialism -- German idealism -- Critical philosophy -- General Semantics -- Existentialism
See also:
Quotations
- To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate someone else's type of thinking. William James
External links
What are our priorities for writing in this area? To help develop a list of the most basic topics in Philosophy, please see Philosophy basic topics.