Philosophy › Section A · Introduction to philosophy › Topic A.1
What is philosophy?
Philosophy asks the most basic questions there are: what exists, what we can know, how we should live and how it all fits together. It began in several parts of the world, and it answers its questions with reasons rather than authority.
A subject that questions itself
Most subjects can say in a line what they study: biology studies living things, geology studies the Earth. Philosophy is harder to pin down, and trying to define it is already a philosophical task. Its questions are the most general ones people ask. What is real? What can we know, and how? What makes an action right? What is a person? Because these questions sit underneath every other field, philosophers cannot take the usual starting assumptions for granted. A good way in is to look at where philosophy came from, at one influential account of its aim, and at its branches today.
The word and the sages
The word philosophy comes from two Greek roots, philia, love, and sophia, wisdom: a philosopher is a lover of wisdom. Before the word existed, many cultures honoured sages, wise people remembered for their insight, leadership or discoveries. In India, the seers called rishis were credited with the hymns of the Vedas, texts known as shruti, what was heard. In China, the sage (sheng) was a model ruler, and legendary figures such as Yao, Shun and Yu, who is said to have tamed great floods, were praised for their wisdom and virtue. Greek writers listed Seven Sages, though the names on the list vary from source to source.
Sages around the world
Sage traditions were not only for men or only for the distant past. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, a woman named Gargi questions the teacher Yajnavalkya about what the whole world is woven upon, and his wife Maitreyi asks whether wealth could ever make her immortal. In Kenya, from the 1970s, the philosopher Henry Odera Oruka (1944 to 1995) interviewed elders whom their communities regarded as wise. He argued that some of them were philosophic sages: thinkers who did not simply repeat inherited beliefs but examined them critically and asked for reasons. His project challenged the claim that philosophy needs writing. The topics of the section "Early philosophy around the world" return to these traditions in depth.
Thales and the first natural philosophers
In the Greek city of Miletus, on the coast of what is now Turkey, Thales (active in the early 500s BCE) is often named as the first Greek philosopher. Ancient writers say he foretold a solar eclipse, usually dated to 585 BCE, and used geometry to find the heights of pyramids from their shadows. His most famous claim was that the underlying source of everything is water. His followers, the Milesians, kept asking what lies beneath change. Parmenides later argued by pure reasoning that what truly exists cannot change at all. Democritus proposed that everything is made of tiny, uncuttable atoms moving in empty space. The Pythagoreans held that nature is ordered by number.
Worked example: why "everything is water" counts as philosophy
Thales's claim is false, so why is it remembered? 1. The question: what single thing underlies all the variety of the world? That is a question about reality as a whole. 2. The kind of answer: a natural substance, not a story about gods, so it can be checked and argued with. 3. The likely reasons, as Aristotle later guessed: all creatures are nourished by moisture, warmth seems to depend on it, and seeds are moist. 4. The response: his successors offered rival principles and criticised his, which is how a debate begins. 5. Conclusion: the answer was wrong, but the method, a general question answered with reasons open to challenge, was new and lasting.
Philosophy and the sciences
For centuries, what we now call science was part of philosophy. Isaac Newton's great work of 1687 was titled Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, and natural philosophy was the usual name for physics. One by one, fields broke away once they found their own methods. Psychology became an experimental science in the late nineteenth century; Wilhelm Wundt opened a psychology laboratory in Leipzig in 1879. Philosophy did not vanish. It still asks about the foundations of each field: what a law of nature is, what counts as evidence, or what it would mean for brain activity to be a thought.
How things hang together
In a 1962 essay, "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man", the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars described philosophy's aim as understanding how everything, taken in the widest sense, fits together. Other experts know their way around one field; the philosopher tries to know a way around the connections between all of them. Sellars called this a kind of know-how, a practical skill, rather than a store of facts. He thought the central task was to reconcile two pictures of the world: the manifest image, the world of people, colours and choices as we experience it, and the scientific image, the world of particles and fields that science describes.
The main branches
Philosophy today is usually divided into branches. Metaphysics asks what reality is ultimately like: mind, matter, time, causation, God and free will. Epistemology asks what knowledge is and how we can have it. Logic studies what makes reasoning good or bad. Ethics asks how we should act and live. Aesthetics studies beauty and art. Political philosophy asks what makes a government legitimate and what justice requires. There is also a "philosophy of" almost every other subject: philosophy of science, of mind, of language, of religion, of mathematics and of law. Many real questions draw on several branches at once.
Worked example: sorting questions into branches
Place each question in its main branch. 1. "Do numbers exist, or did we invent them?" asks what is real, so it is metaphysics, with links to philosophy of mathematics. 2. "Can I be sure I am not dreaming right now?" asks what we can know, so it is epistemology. 3. "If all cats are mammals and Tom is a cat, must Tom be a mammal?" asks whether a conclusion follows, so it is logic. 4. "Is it wrong to break a promise to help a stranger?" is ethics. 5. "Can a urinal displayed in a gallery be art?" is aesthetics. 6. Check: in each case, ask what kind of answer would settle the question.
Common mistakes to avoid
First, philosophy is not just personal opinion; a philosophical view must be backed by reasons that others can test. Second, philosophy did not begin only in Greece: India, China, Africa and other regions had their own early traditions of reflective thought. Third, an old theory that turned out false, such as Thales's water, is not worthless; its importance may lie in the question it asked and the method it used. Fourth, philosophy is not a rival to science. Many sciences grew out of it, and it still examines their basic concepts.
Key takeaways
Philosophy, from the Greek for love of wisdom, examines the most general questions about reality, knowledge, value and reasoning, and it answers them with reasons rather than authority. Sage traditions in India, China, Africa and Greece mark some of its many beginnings. Thales and the other early Greek natural philosophers asked what lies beneath change and offered answers open to argument. Many sciences began as natural philosophy. Sellars saw philosophy's aim as understanding how everything fits together, especially the manifest and scientific images. Its main branches are metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, aesthetics and political philosophy.
Flashcards
Flashcard
From Greek philia (love) and sophia (wisdom): the love of wisdom
Test your understanding
Question 1 of 5
What do the Greek roots of the word philosophy mean?
Question 2 of 5
"Can I ever be certain that my senses are not deceiving me?" Which branch of philosophy does this question mainly belong to?
Question 3 of 5
Why is Thales's claim that everything comes from water still treated as an important moment in philosophy?
Question 4 of 5
What did Wilfrid Sellars mean by the manifest image?
Question 5 of 5
What was Henry Odera Oruka's sage philosophy project designed to show?