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     from Wikipedia

    Philosophy

    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Jump to: navigation, search
    The philosopher Socrates about to take poison hemlock.
    The philosopher Socrates about to take poison hemlock.

    Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, justice, beauty, validity, mind and language.[1][2] Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions (such as mysticism or mythology) by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned argument.[3] The word philosophy is of Ancient Greek origin: φιλοσοφία (philosophía), meaning "love of knowledge", "love of wisdom".[4][5][6]

    Branches of philosophy

    To give an exhaustive list of the main branches of philosophy is difficult, because there have been different, equally acceptable divisions at different times, and the divisions are often relative to the concerns of a particular period. However, the following branches are usually accepted as the main ones.

    • Metaphysics investigates the nature of being and the world. Traditional branches are cosmology and ontology.
    • Epistemology is concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge, and whether knowledge is possible. Among its central concerns has been the challenge posed by skepticism and the relationships between truth, belief and justification.
    • Ethics, or 'moral philosophy', is concerned with questions of how persons ought to act or if such questions are answerable. The main branches of ethics are meta-ethics (sometimes called "analytic ethics"), normative ethics and applied ethics. Metaethics concerns the nature of ethical thought, comparison of various ethical systems, whether there are absolute ethical truths, and how such truths could be known. Ethics is also associated with the idea of morality. Plato's early dialogues include a search for definitions of virtue.
    • Political Philosophy is the study of government and the relationship of individuals and communities to the state. It includes questions about law, property, and the rights and obligations of the citizen.
    • Aesthetics deals with beauty, art, enjoyment, sensory-emotional values, perception, and matters of taste and sentiment.
    • Logic deals with patterns of thinking that lead from true premises to true conclusions. Beginning in the late 19th century, mathematicians such as Frege began a mathematical treatment of logic, and today the subject of logic has two broad divisions: mathematical logic (formal symbolic logic) and what is now called philosophical logic.
    • Philosophy of Mind deals with the nature of the mind and its relationship to the body, and is typified by disputes between dualism and materialism. In recent years there is an increasing connection between this branch of philosophy and cognitive science
    • Philosophy of language: is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language.

    Most academic subjects have a philosophy, for example the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of history. In addition, a range of academic subjects have emerged to deal with areas which would have historically been the subject of philosophy. These include Psychology, Anthropology and Science.

    Western philosophy

    History

    The introduction of the terms "philosopher" and "philosophy" has been ascribed to the Greek thinker Pythagoras (see Diogenes Laertius: "De vita et moribus philosophorum", I, 12; Cicero: "Tusculanae disputationes", V, 8-9). The ascription is based on a passage in a lost work of Herakleides Pontikos, a disciple of Aristotle. It is considered to be part of the widespread legends of Pythagoras of this time. "Philosopher" replaced the word "sophist" (from sophoi), which was used to describe "wise men," teachers of rhetoric, who were important in Athenian democracy.

    The history of philosophy is customarily divided into three periods: Ancient philosophy, Medieval philosophy, and Modern philosophy. For a map with the dates and places of birth of most western philosophers see here.

    Ancient philosophy

    Main article: Ancient philosophy
    Plato
    Plato

    Ancient philosophy is the philosophy of the Graeco-Roman world from the sixth century [circa 585] B.C. to the fourth century A.D. It is usually divided into four periods: the pre-Socratic period, the periods of Plato and Aristotle, and the post-Aristotelian (or Hellenistic) period. Sometimes a fifth period is added that includes the Christian and Neo-Platonist philosophers. The most important of the ancient philosophers (in terms of subsequent influence) are Plato and Aristotle[7].

    The themes of ancient philosophy are: understanding the fundamental causes and principles of the universe; explaining it in an economical and uniform way; the epistemological problem of reconciling the diversity and change of the natural universe, with the possibility of obtaining fixed and certain knowledge about it; questions about things which cannot be perceived by the senses, such as numbers, elements, universals, and gods; the analysis of patterns of reasoning and argument; the nature of the good life and the importance of understanding and knowledge in order to pursue it; the explication of the concept of justice, and its relation to various political systems[8].

    In this period the crucial features of the philosophical method were established: a critical approach to received or established views, and the appeal to reason and argumentation.

    Medieval philosophy

    Main article: Medieval philosophy

    Medieval philosophy is the philosophy of Western Europe and the Middle East during what is now known as the medieval era or the Middle Ages, roughly extending from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance. Medieval philosophy is defined partly by the rediscovery and further development of classical Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, and partly by the need to address theological problems and to integrate sacred doctrine (in Islam, Judaism and Christianity) with secular learning.

    Some problems discussed throughout this period are the relation of faith to reason, the existence and unity of God, the object of theology and metaphysics, the problems of knowledge, of universals, and of individuation.

    Philosophers from the Middle Ages include the Muslim philosophers Alkindus, Alfarabi, Alhacen, Avicenna, Algazel, Avempace, Abubacer and Averroes; the Jewish philosophers Maimonides and Gersonides; and the Christian philosophers Anselm, Peter Abelard, Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham and Jean Buridan.

    Early modern philosophy (c. 1600 – c. 1800)

    The early modern period begins with the revival of skepticism and with the growth of modern physical science. The main themes of this era are: the problem of how we can know anything about the world outside our own minds; the dispute between rationalists and empiricists, rationalists holding that the ultimate source of knowledge is reason, empiricists, that any genuine knowledge must be justified by experience; the nature of the mind or self, and its relation to the body, and the closely related problem of reconciling our belief in free will with the emerging scientific picture of the physical universe as deterministic; attempts to explain the relationship between God and science, and the rebirth of political philosophy.

    Canonical figures include Montaigne, Descartes, Francis Bacon, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant.[9] Chronologically, this era spans the 17th and 18th centuries, and is generally considered to end with Kant's systematic attempt to reconcile Newtonian physics with traditional metaphysical topics.[10]

    Nineteenth century philosophy

    Later modern philosophy is usually considered to begin after the philosophy of Immanuel Kant at the beginning of the 19th-century.[11] German idealists, such as Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling, expanded on the work of Kant by maintaining that the world is constituted by a rational mind-like process, and as such is entirely knowable.[12]

    Rejecting idealism, other philosophers, many working from outside the university, initiated lines of thought that would occupy academic philosophy in the early and mid-20th century:

    Contemporary philosophy (c. 1900 – present)

    In the last hundred years, philosophy has increasingly become an activity practiced within the university, and accordingly it has grown more specialized and more distinct from the natural sciences. Much of philosophy in this period concerns itself with explaining the relation between the theories of the natural sciences and the ideas of the humanities or common sense.

    In the Anglophone world, analytic philosophy became the dominant school. In the first half of the century, it was a cohesive school, more or less identical to logical positivism, united by the notion that philosophical problems could and should be solved by attention to logic and language. In the latter half of the twentieth century, analytic philosophy diffused into a wide variety of disparate philosophical views, only loosely united by historical lines of influence and a self-identified commitment to clarity and rigor. Since roughly 1960, analytic philosophy has shown a revival of interest in the history of philosophy, as well as attempts to integrate philosophical work with scientific results, especially in psychology and cognitive science.

    On continental Europe, no single school or temperament enjoyed dominance. The flight of the logical positivists from central Europe during the 1930s and 1940s, however, diminished philosophical interest in natural science, and an emphasis on the humanities, broadly construed, figures prominently in what is usually called "continental philosophy". Twentieth century movements such as phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, structuralism, and poststructuralism are included within this loose category.

    Main Doctrines

    Realism and nominalism

    Main articles: Realism and Nominalism

    Realism sometimes means the position opposed to the 18th-century Idealism, namely that some things have real existence outside the mind. Classically, however, realism is the doctrine that abstract entities corresponding to universal terms like 'man' have a real existence. It is opposed to nominalism, the view that abstract or universal terms are words only, or denote mental states such as ideas, beliefs, or intentions. The latter position, famously held by William of Ockham, is conceptualism.

    Rationalism and empiricism

    René Descartes
    René Descartes
    Main articles: Rationalism and Empiricism

    Rationalism is any view emphasizing the role or importance of human reason. Extreme rationalism tries to base all knowledge on reason alone. Rationalism typically starts from premises that cannot coherently be denied, then attempts by logical steps to deduce every possible object of knowledge.

    The first rationalist, in this broad sense, is often held to be Parmenides (fl. 480 BCE), who argued that it is impossible to doubt that thinking actually occurs. But thinking must have an object, therefore something beyond thinking really exists. Parmenides deduced that what really exists must have certain properties – for example, that it cannot come into existence or cease to exist, that it is a coherent whole, that it remains the same eternally (in fact, exists altogether outside time). Zeno of Elea (born c. 489 BCE) was a disciple of Parmenides, and argued that motion is impossible, since the assertion that it exists implies a contradiction.


    Plato (427–347 BCE) was also influenced by Parmenides, but combined rationalism with a form of realism. The philosopher's work is to consider being, and the essence of things. But the characteristic of essences is that they are universal. The nature of a man, a triangle, a tree, applies to all men, all triangles, all trees. Plato argued that these essences are mind-independent 'forms', that humans (but particularly philosophers) can come to know by reason, and by ignoring the distractions of sense-perception.

    Modern rationalism begins with