See also philosophers.
Many folks will, when prompted (and sometimes when not), exhibit a great deal of hostility to philosophy and those who study it -- viewing it as a waste of time, a foppish pursuit of a bourgeois intelligensia, or an outright danger to freedom or traditional sensibilities.
Now, I know that not all of the writeups in this node are very serious, but nevertheless: I want to make a few things clear.
Everyone has opinions. However, not everyone can defend those opinions, and as a result, they can do nothing but rant. A set of well-defended and well-thought-out opinions is a philosophy.
These "opinions" that one must learn to defend are not necessarily "random ideas" -- they are the foundations of our sciences and our institutions. Everything that one does expresses a certain philosophy, from a corporate mission statement to the way you break up with someone. Everyone has different ideas about what is right, what is good, and what is true.
Every discipline, from physics to law, has a philosophical aspect which is hammered out by the professionals in those areas, for two uses. Firstly, the philosophical underpinnings of a discipline permit different writers to critique one another. If one writer challenges another's work, they make reference to their common principles. If they cannot immediately find common principles, they are likely to engage in some kind of debate which will, inevitably, be of philosophical form.
Secondly, it permits workers in different fields to understand one another and work together. For example, Marxism was, in large part, a conceptual tool that allowed 19th-century economists and 19th-century political scientists to speak with the same jargon to address some of their common problems.
According to the Western tradition, the formal study of philosophy at the university level focuses mainly on metaphysics (speculation about the ultimate nature of the universe and its operations), epistemology (theorisation about how knowledge "works"), philosophy of mind (how it "works"), logic (the mathematics of implication), ethics (the study of right and wrong), and esthetics (the study of beauty and how it "works").
Those who say that philosophy is detached from reality because it relies on logic rather than empirical evidence are quite off-base; empiricism is itself a philosophy; it is the epistemological theory which has formed the basis of our modern philosophy of science. The criticism itself is a logical equation which does not reference actual practices in philosophy. Furthermore and even more ironically, logical operations can only be demonstrated by reference to everyday thought practices -- thus making it, in a certain respect, empirical.
Objections based on the idea that philosophy is used only to make others look stupid or to make yourself look cool are merely decrying the study of rhetoric, which is far more central to law than to philosophy.
As is hopefully quite well explained by an introduction to Philosophy teacher; there are two uses for the word Philosophy. I have heard them referred to as the weak use and the strong use.
First the weak use; which tends to muck things up when it comes to the strong use. You go through your life on a certain collection of principles you believe to be correct, and can confront more or less any situation with them. This is a philosophy. These can be held in a Dogmatic, Philosophical, or Subjective way and, depending on how you hold them, you may do some rash things because you hold the philosophy.
Second the strong use. Your walking along the street one day and suddenly you get the bright idea to wonder about all of those things you hold to be true. You think, "gee I seem to have made a lot of assumptions without seeing what kinds of logical problems they create." Now you have started on the path of doing Philosophy. If you were to buy into a philosophy in the weak sense like oh say a religion, you would likely hold all their views dogmatically. However, at some time you may have a Hindu friend who talks about his religion. So now you decide that you should really look at what you believe and why you believe it. You get lost on a thought trip; find yourself in Germany; begin really thinking about how you know what you know and why you can know it; and finally come to weird conclusions like cogito ergo sum. After questioning assumptions you try to build a logical foundation on fact (not opinion, which is a common misconception about Philosophy), and once you work out the kinks dialectically you come to have a good philosophy (yes in the weak since).
There are as was noted 5 branches of study in philosophy
I hope this either clears up the difference, or confuses you just enough to make you read more about philosophy.
Back to The Everything Civilopedia...
Nowadays it seems like everything has a "philosophy". Marketing campaigns, people, companies - they all have "philosophies". Or rather, they think they do. Philosophy literally means "love of wisdom", but it is a term that has become overloaded with all manner of extra connotations and meanings over thousands of years. It means a bit more than simply holding opinions that you can defend. What it originally denoted when philosophy began is a relatively simple idea, if perhaps now a counterintuitive one.
Philosophy is the human capacity which aims to investigate questions that are of concern to man as man. This means that the issues it investigates are both timeless and transcend cultures. A concern with ideas that are specific to a particular culture and time are instead the hallmarks of what we call the "intellectual". The difference between Plato and an Ancient Greek intellectual is that Plato addressed topics that will concern man for evermore, which is why he is still read avidly today. And while these questions concern all cultures, their investigation via philosophy is not something that has occurred in all cultures - it is rather the unique contribution of the Greeks to western civilization.
Throughout history most cultures have addressed questions of first principles by reference to either gods or ancient heroes to whom they attribute their beginnings. Earlier generations were presumed to have had privileged access to divine knowledge which is now embodied in either scripture or tradition. Philosophy emerges when people notice the multiplicity of traditions and religions in the world and take it upon themselves to work from this diversity of opinion about questions such as how life ought to be lived and to try and work out, through their own capacity to reason, what the answers to various questions about life and the universe are.
Each of the branches of philosophy has at its core a question or set of questions that are of concern to man as man. For instance, political philosophy asks: What is freedom? What is justice? In a way, this is the most practical of all branches of philosophy because these are questions that every society must answer explicitly; and, they are questions that will concern people for as long as they must live together. They are hence the proper sphere of philosophy - an investigation of the first principles of man as a social and political being, and of the various possible ways in which people can live together. The limits of political philosophy are coeval with all the possible ways that politics might be organized, and it conists of a consideration of these possibilities.
To take another example, metaphysics asks: What is the nature of Being? "Being" sounds rather outdated now, and a more modern way of stating it is: What are energy and matter? For the longest time men sought the solution to this problem through the power of their minds alone, constructing grand theories from the ether - the idea of the atom originated in this fashion in Ancient Greece. But metaphysics has fallen severely out of fashion of late because it has been overtaken by empirical science, which in itself involves the philosophical choice of choosing to investigate the world through our sense-perception. Indeed, science can be viewed as the most successful branch of modern philosophy, as its efforts to ascertain the true nature of Being through empirical investigation rather than abstract metaphysical theorizing have delivered real results. And clearly, the true nature of energy and matter are of concern to man as man regardless of his culture and the period in which he lives.
Philosophy is then the human capacity which allows us to use our reason to transcend our immediate surroundings and turn ourselves to these larger questions. As such, it involves an alienation from one's immediate surroundings and the ability to question received wisdom. This is perhaps where philosophy derives its reputation for being irrelevant or somehow merely academic from - it certainly does not appear, at first glance, to address any concrete practical concern faced by people in their everyday lives.
Yet there is arguably no such thing as a free life that does not concern itself with the first principles of things and instead accepts them unthinkingly from its surroundings. And so the call has gone out from philosophers down the ages - go out and investigate the realm of ideas, but don't expect to be too welcome in the cave of real life if you want to come back burdened with what you have discovered.
The modern turn against philosophy is in a large attributable to the success of a specific form of knowledge, science, and its technological ramifications. A specific set of philosophical choices about the nature of the universe and of human knowledge have become so dominant and delivered such amazing results in terms of transforming the way that our societies function that all other possibilities seem to have sunk into the background. But even for Nietzsche to be able to declare that God is dead - that from now on we repudiate any belief in the immaterial, in philosophy's grand theories as much as in God - was itself a philosophical enterprise, an altering of ideas about the first principles of metaphysics, human living-together and knowledge.
These new assumptions serve us fine for now and appear to have vanquished in most people's mind the need for further philosophical speculation, except at the margins. We resemble, and not a little, the pre-philosophic peoples who place all their faith in the teachings of the past. But in a new world - a world, perhaps, of peak oil and climate change, or one dominated by a China which has developed without the influence of our western philosophy and has ideas very different of its own - we will need new philosophies and new investigations, for the engine in the current motor of our societies will have run out of gas. It is the comfort of philosophy students that as this time approaches, they are the gatekeepers of mankind's investigations into the first principles so far - just as the Arabs were during our Dark Ages, before transmitting Europe's past to her progency - and thus the hope for its continuation in the future.
Phi*los"o*phy (?), n.; pl. Philosophies (#). [OE. philosophie, F. philosophie, L. philosophia, from Gr. . See Philosopher.]
1.
Literally, the love of, including the search after, wisdom; in actual usage, the knowledge of phenomena as explained by, and resolved into, causes and reasons, powers and laws.
When applied to any particular department of knowledge, philosophy denotes the general laws or principles under which all the subordinate phenomena or facts relating to that subject are comprehended. Thus philosophy, when applied to God and the divine government, is called theology; when applied to material objects, it is called physics; when it treats of man, it is called anthropology and psychology, with which are connected logic and ethics; when it treats of the necessary conceptions and relations by which philosophy is possible, it is called metaphysics.
"Philosophy has been defined: tionscience of things divine and human, and the causes in which they are contained; -- the science of effects by their causes; -- the science of sufficient reasons; -- the science of things possible, inasmuch as they are possible; -- the science of things evidently deduced from first principles; -- the science of truths sensible and abstract; -- the application of reason to its legitimate objects; -- the science of the relations of all knowledge to the necessary ends of human reason; -- the science of the original form of the ego, or mental self; -- the science of science; -- the science of the absolute; -- the scienceof the absolute indifference of the ideal and real."
Sir W. Hamilton.
2.
A particular philosophical system or theory; the hypothesis by which particular phenomena are explained.
[Books] of Aristotle and his philosophie. Chaucer.
We shall in vain interpret their words by the notions of our philosophy and the doctrines in our school. Locke.
3.
Practical wisdom; calmness of temper and judgment; equanimity; fortitude; stoicism; as, to meet misfortune with philosophy.
Then had he spent all his philosophy. Chaucer.
4.
Reasoning; argumentation.
Of good and evil much they argued then, . . . Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy. Milton.
5.
The course of sciences read in the schools.
Johnson.
6.
A treatise on philosophy.
Philosophy of the Academy, that of Plato, who taught his disciples in a grove in Athens called the Academy. -- Philosophy of the Garden, that of Epicurus, who taught in a garden in Athens. -- Philosophy of the Lyceum, that of Aristotle, the founder of the Peripatetic school, who delivered his lectures in the Lyceum at Athens. -- Philosophy of the Porch, that of Zeno and the Stoics; -- so called because Zeno of Citium and his successors taught in the porch of the Poicile, a great hall in Athens.
© Webster 1913.
printable version chaos
Everything2 Help
