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Philosophy has almost as many definitions as there have been philosophers, and no simple definition can do it justice. The word is derived from the ancient Greek words philo-, to love or to befriend, and -sophia, wisdom. It can be construed then either as the love of wisdom or the wisdom of love. In the contemporary English-speaking academic world it is often used implicitly to refer to analytic philosophy and, in non-English speaking countries, it often refers implicitly to continental philosophy. Modern usage of the term is much broader; the concept of philosophy encompasses all of knowledge and all that can be known, including the means by which such knowledge can be acquired. The ancient Greeks organized the subject into five basic categories: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics and aesthetics. This organization of the subject is still largely in use in Western philosophy today.
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Philosophy ponders the most fundamental questions humankind has been able to ask. These are increasingly numerous and over time they have been arranged into the overlapping branches of the philosophy tree:
- Logic: What makes a good argument? How can I think critically about complicated arguments? What makes for good thinking? When can I say that something just does not make sense? Where is the origin of logic?
- Epistemology: What is the nature of knowledge? How do we come to know what we know? What are the limits and scope of knowledge? How can we know that there are other minds (if we can)? How can we know that there is an external world (if we can)? How can we prove our answers? What is a true statement?
- Metaphysics: What sorts of things exist? What is the nature of those things? Do some things exist independently of our perception? What is the nature of space and time? What is the relationship of the mind to the body? What is it to be a person? What is it to be conscious? Does God exist?
- Ethics: Is there a difference between ethically right and wrong actions (or values, or institutions)? If so, what is that difference? Which actions are right, and which wrong? Do divine commands make right acts right, or is their rightness based on something else? Are there standards of rightness that are absolute, or are all such standards relative to particular cultures? How should I live? What is happiness?
- Aesthetics: What is art? What is beauty? Is there a standard of taste? Is art meaningful? If so, what does it mean? What is good art? Is art for the purpose of an end, or is "art for art's sake?" What connects us to art? How does art affect us? Is some art unethical? Can art corrupt or elevate societies?
- Philosophy of Language: How are sentences composed into a meaningful whole, and what are the meanings of the parts of sentences? What is the nature of meaning? (What exactly is a meaning?) What do we do with language? How do we use it socially? (What is the purpose of language?) How does language relate to the mind, both of the speaker and the interpreter? How does language relate to the world? (Courtesy of the Philosophy of Language wikipedia page)
- Political philosophy: How are political institutions and the exercise of power justified? What is justice? What is the proper role and scope of government? Is democracy the best form of governance? To what extent should the state be allowed to promote the norms and values of a certain moral or religious doctrine? When are states allowed to go to war? Do states have duties against inhabitants of other states?
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| editSelected Philosopher |
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
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Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who contributed several ground-breaking works to modern philosophy, primarily on the foundations of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. [1]
Although numerous collections from Wittgenstein's notebooks, papers, and lectures have been published since his death, he published only one philosophical book in his lifetime — the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1921. Wittgenstein's early work was deeply influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer, and by the new systems of logic put forward by Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege. When the Tractatus was published, it was taken up as a major influence by the Vienna Circle positivists. However, Wittgenstein did not consider himself part of that school and alleged that logical positivism involved grave misunderstandings of the Tractatus...
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| editWestern philosophical schools of thought |
| Agnosticism - Alexandrian school - Analytic philosophy - Anarchism - Atheism - Cambridge Platonists - Christian philosophy - Coherentism - Consequentialism - Contextualism - Contractualism - Continental philosophy - Communism - Critical theory - Cynics - Deconstructionism - Deep Ecology - Deism - Deontology - Egoism - ecosophy - Empiricism - Epicureanism - Ethical egoism - Existentialism - Extropianism - Foundationalism - Frankfurt School - Hegelianism - Hermeneutics - Humanism - Idealism - Integral theory - Islamic philosophy - Jewish philosophy - Liberalism - Logical positivism - Marxist philosophy - Materialism - Modernism - Mysticism - Neoplatonism - Nihilism - Objectivism - Phenomenalism - Phenomenology - Postmodernism - Pragmatism - Psychological egoism - Rationalism - Realism - Relativism - Reliabilism - Platonism - Scholasticism - School of Brentano - Scotism - Situated ethics - Situational ethics - Skepticism - Solipsism - Sophism - Spiritism - Stoicism - Theology - Transcendentalism - Theism - Transhumanism - Utilitarianism - Young Hegelians - Verificationism - Vienna Circle - Virtue ethics - Western philosophy |
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| editEastern and other philosophical schools of thought |
| African philosophy - Ayyavazhi - Buddhism - Confucianism - Eastern philosophy - Ethiopian philosophy - Hinduism - Jainism - Karma - Legalism - Maoism - Shinto - Islamic philosophy - Sufism - Taoism - Kyoto School - Baul - Zoroastrianism |
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WikiProject Philosophy task list
- Charles Peirce: This article needs a lot of help. The POV is way too idiosyncratic and the style is offputting for a general audience, to say the least. You will have to be willing to go to the mat, however, with the primary author, who has been banned but has reappeared under different names.
- Desert: At least narrow it down to being in philosophy, ethics, or morality. An actual article at any of these three would be nice, too.
- Cesare Cremonini: created "start-level", would need new eyes and hands.
- Fatalism: Stub-like. Needs to be cleaned up and expanded
- Aristotelianism: Needs to be expanded
- Logical argument: Needs work to be of use
- Sign / Symbol: Introductions contain too much technical jargon
- Catholic Probabilism: Pretty nearly straight from the old Catholic Encyclopedia
- Counterfactuals: Needs fuller and more accurate summary of main theories, as well as indication of philosophical importance in other topics, notably causation and inference.
- Human agency: Expand, correct, and reference. Any support for altering the name?
- Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology Sartre's magnum opus, barely more than a stub
- Übermensch: desperately needs knowledgable attention
- Kant's Groundwork: re-write, expand
- Existentialism: in dire need of a cleanup and reworking of information
- African philosophy: needs a lot of work!
Vote | Larry's Text | stubs | edit this list | discuss these tasks | Category:Philosophy | Portal:Philosophy | RFC
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| editGeneral topics of Philosophy |
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- ...that Francisco de Vitoria, a Spanish Renaissance Roman Catholic theologian, was the founder of the tradition in philosophy known as the School of Salamanca?
- ...that a 2001 discovery of lost manuscripts by Spanish philosopher and writer Ramon Llull showed that he had indeed discovered the Borda count and Condorcet criterion, and as a result he has been called the father of computation theory?
- ...that although the paradox, Buridan's ass, is named after French priest Jean Buridan, it had already been previously stated in De Caelo by Aristotle?
- ...that besides being a philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz was an engineer, lawyer, philologist, sinophile, and a famed mathematician who invented calculus?
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| editSelected Philosophy article |
| Eudaimonism is a philosophy that defines right action as that which leads to "well being." The concept originates in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. In Aristotle eudaimonism means that all correct actions lead to the greater well being of the individual human. By extending well being from the narrowest concerns to the largest, all social rules can be adduced. Augustine of Hippo adopted the concept as beatitudo, and Thomas Aquinas worked it out into a Christian ethical scheme. For Aquinas, well-being is found ultimately in a direct perception of God, or complete blessedness.
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