The discipline of Philosophy comes to us today as a word derived from the Greek language meaning “Love of knowing”, and this statement is the first clue to what philosophy is. It should be the interest, excitement and willingness to question, and in this sense though science is no longer called “natural philosophy” it inherited the desire to know from its origin in philosophy. Philosophy is not simply a body of written works or theories from before science, nor a name for someone who loves knowledge it is a system of asking questions and thinking about the world, it is often translated as love of knowledge, but this is inaccurate, it should be considered a verb the love of knowing. Most people are used to thinking about the world in a certain way, you may or may not call this a philosophical approach, and you may simply think of it as the way the world works, your “common- sense.” The most important thing you can learn from philosophy is to use the same skepticism that scientists use about material questions to ask about common-sense, to ask about the basic assumptions and views about the world. Common sense is held as one way of being, one set of ideas to be considered, and only one example of how to look at the world. Probably the most famous philosopher in the world once described the importance of philosophy as the ability to consider and understand ideas and views honestly and seriously even if you don’t hold them. The basic presumption of philosophy is that we have the choice of examining our understanding of the world as an educated person, or accepting our understanding of the world unexamined as an uneducated person.
What kind of things does philosophy study?
Philosophy can be simplistically described as being divided into three broad categories, each distinct, but connected and resting on the other:
Metaphysics (also called Ontology): ways of describing rules or lists of what is or is not in the world, rather like a Venn diagram showing known things in the world as a circle within possible things in the world and a little circle nearby of things that cannot exist in the world but have been considered. For example one might place ghosts into the category of things that are not real, while another person would consider them possible, this would offer an example of a difference in metaphysics.
Epistemological: ways of deciding correct knowledge, reliability tests, divisions between belief and knowledge, for example some people have faith in religious teachings as knowledge, others think that religion cannot be knowledge, this is an example of epistemology resting on ontological belief. Other people think that shared belief in a fact is evidence of knowledge (consensus) and some people say it can’t be used as evidence, but demonstrates commonality of belief.
Ethics: ways of knowing about what one should do, what is good or bad. Rules for how a person or group shall act in the world defined by the metaphysics they hold. For example the Hippocratic oath taken by doctors is based on an older division between doing harm and doing good in actions, which is different from traditional catholic religious dogma that places good and bad on the intention and the accordance with a set of religious rules.
This division is important but it is also false, each category influences and interacts with the others, this is a important division but remembering the whole is equally important, much like the colloquial description of light as both a wave and a collection of particles, the description is more complicated to physicists, but gives a hint of the deeper meaning in the commonly used division.
What philosophy underlies Science and Critical Inquiry?
Often the philosophy behind science is called objectivity but really contemporary science relies on several ideas: while objectivity specifically refers to the aim of making object knowledge statements that are true regardless of the subject involved in making them, it is at its core an ethical statement. It is a claim about what should be the goal of knowing, not the methods for achieving objective knowledge. The method of achieving that knowledge comes from other concepts: empiricism – the philosophy of knowing about the world relying on sense perception and observation, naturalism/materialism- the philosophical statement that the world is known through what are considered material and natural, this is often considered the most important, but
In the phenomenological tradition of philosophy the goal of analysis is to understand both the experiential conditions of life, and the forms of and specific phenomena of the world that gives the tradition its name. At the same time the tradition does not eschew the accrual of knowledge, contrarily the objective is constructed with recourse to the subjective realm of experience. Human being, phenomenology suggests, is limited in the ways we can know about the world to our senses as experience rather than true knowledge in and of themselves. For phenomenologist philosophy the world is object of correspondence only through the accumulation of understandings and experience, and the object of study is the depth of meanings and experiences that arise from and form the human condition.
In this way phenomenology diverges from naïve or essential empiricism, in which the accrual of sense perception and the interpretation of these data can be separated, and in so doing the fundamental knowledge of the world can be determined from the world itself- aside from experience or interpretation of it. For the hard empiricist the world is the object of correspondence and the object of study, empiricism is a commitment to the collection and categorization of the glimpses of the world. Phenomenology and empiricism are not exclusive or contradictory, instead they should be seen as complimentary as the one can be a result of the other - by not throwing away the object of the others study. This is to say that to borrow a phrase from science, that each considers the object of the study of the other as signal to noise. The phenomenologist collects data that an empiricist would appreciate as sense data, but which may not be meaningful in the frame of experience, at the same time the empiricist actively attempts to separate out the experiential. The knowledge of meaning allows better empiricism; the knowledge of experience naturally leads to the production of data about the world. It is a common fallacy to consider the world as only meaning or only material.
What is Philosophy?
The discipline of Philosophy comes to us today as a word derived from the Greek language meaning “Love of knowing”, and this statement is the first clue to what philosophy is. It should be the interest, excitement and willingness to question, and in this sense though science is no longer called “natural philosophy” it inherited the desire to know from its origin in philosophy. Philosophy is not simply a body of written works or theories from before science, nor a name for someone who loves knowledge it is a system of asking questions and thinking about the world, it is often translated as love of knowledge, but this is inaccurate, it should be considered a verb the love of knowing.
Most people are used to thinking about the world in a certain way, you may or may not call this a philosophical approach, and you may simply think of it as the way the world works, your “common- sense.” The most important thing you can learn from philosophy is to use the same skepticism that scientists use about material questions to ask about common-sense, to ask about the basic assumptions and views about the world. Common sense is held as one way of being, one set of ideas to be considered, and only one example of how to look at the world.
Probably the most famous philosopher in the world once described the importance of philosophy as the ability to consider and understand ideas and views honestly and seriously even if you don’t hold them. The basic presumption of philosophy is that we have the choice of examining our understanding of the world as an educated person, or accepting our understanding of the world unexamined as an uneducated person.
What kind of things does philosophy study?
Philosophy can be simplistically described as being divided into three broad categories, each distinct, but connected and resting on the other:
Metaphysics (also called Ontology): ways of describing rules or lists of what is or is not in the
world, rather like a Venn diagram showing known things in the world as a circle within possible things in the world and a little circle nearby of things that cannot exist in the world but have been considered. For example one might place ghosts into the category of things that are not real, while another person would consider them possible, this would offer an example of a difference in metaphysics.
Epistemological: ways of deciding correct knowledge, reliability tests, divisions between belief
and knowledge, for example some people have faith in religious teachings as knowledge,
others think that religion cannot be knowledge, this is an example of epistemology resting on ontological belief. Other people think that shared belief in a fact is evidence of knowledge (consensus) and some people say it can’t be used as evidence, but demonstrates commonality of belief.
Ethics: ways of knowing about what one should do, what is good or bad. Rules for how a
person or group shall act in the world defined by the metaphysics they hold. For example
the Hippocratic oath taken by doctors is based on an older division between doing harm
and doing good in actions, which is different from traditional catholic religious dogma
that places good and bad on the intention and the accordance with a set of religious rules.
This division is important but it is also false, each category influences and interacts with the others, this is a important division but remembering the whole is equally important, much like the colloquial description of light as both a wave and a collection of particles, the description is more complicated to physicists, but gives a hint of the deeper meaning in the commonly used division.
What philosophy underlies Science and Critical Inquiry?
Often the philosophy behind science is called objectivity but really contemporary science relies on several ideas: while objectivity specifically refers to the aim of making object knowledge statements that are true regardless of the subject involved in making them, it is at its core an ethical statement. It is a claim about what should be the goal of knowing, not the methods for achieving objective knowledge. The method of achieving that knowledge comes from other concepts: empiricism – the philosophy of knowing about the world relying on sense perception and observation, naturalism/materialism- the philosophical statement that the world is known through what are considered material and natural, this is often considered the most important, but
In the phenomenological tradition of philosophy the goal of analysis is to understand both the experiential conditions of life, and the forms of and specific phenomena of the world that gives the tradition its name. At the same time the tradition does not eschew the accrual of knowledge, contrarily the objective is constructed with recourse to the subjective realm of experience. Human being, phenomenology suggests, is limited in the ways we can know about the world to our senses as experience rather than true knowledge in and of themselves. For phenomenologist philosophy the world is object of correspondence only through the accumulation of understandings and experience, and the object of study is the depth of meanings and experiences that arise from and form the human condition.
In this way phenomenology diverges from naïve or essential empiricism, in which the accrual of sense perception and the interpretation of these data can be separated, and in so doing the fundamental knowledge of the world can be determined from the world itself- aside from experience or interpretation of it. For the hard empiricist the world is the object of correspondence and the object of study, empiricism is a commitment to the collection and categorization of the glimpses of the world. Phenomenology and empiricism are not exclusive or contradictory, instead they should be seen as complimentary as the one can be a result of the other - by not throwing away the object of the others study. This is to say that to borrow a phrase from science, that each considers the object of the study of the other as signal to noise. The phenomenologist collects data that an empiricist would appreciate as sense data, but which may not be meaningful in the frame of experience, at the same time the empiricist actively attempts to separate out the experiential. The knowledge of meaning allows better empiricism; the knowledge of experience naturally leads to the production of data about the world. It is a common fallacy to consider the world as only meaning or only material.
One element of this conjunction is the