January 24, 2017

Sally Loreto

What is Philosophy?
Based on the lecture of Dr. Richard Brown

I.

Introduction
The lecture starts by asking the typical philosophical questions about the
meaning of life, what is real, and the kind of answer they give.
Pre-philosophical way of thinking the way people thought about reality
before philosophy was discovered. Lecture is historically oriented.

II.

What is Philosophy?
a. Pre-philosophical way of thinking and Western Philosophy (PreSocratic Philosophy)
Humans used to have an agricultural kind of lifestyle. Farming,
settling down, domesticating animals, no longer living the huntergatherer/nomad lifestyle. At the start of civilization (roughly around
3500-3300 BCE). But cities are yet to develop at this time as there
were still tribal association and society then was family oriented.
The civilized life as we know it started developing around three
thousand hundred years before year one and along with it is the

invention and development of writing as evident with cuneiform,

hieroglyphs, etc. and these earlier forms of writing gave us an idea on
how humans thought and how they viewed themselves in the grander
scheme.
The Mesopotamian civilization had the Epic of Gilgamesh that tells
the story of a great king named Gilgamesh who wants to know why
people die, what the meaning of life is, and how we can be immortal.
Gilgamesh asks the same deep questions that philosophers do like
why people die, what the meaning of life is, and how we can be
immortal proving that human beings in general have always been
interested in these kind of questions. And the way they answer these
questions is rooted on the thought that human beings are not capable
of figuring out the answers on their own hence divine revelation is
used to explain the way reality is.
The origins of Western Philosophy started around 600-200 BCE
Greece by Thales of Miletus. Philosophers in this era focused on
questions about the make-up of the physical world and used reason,
argument, and observation as sources of knowledge about the world.
b. Philosophy

The word philosophy came from the Greek words Philia Sophia
which translates to love of knowledge. It was first suggested by
Pythagoras (570 BCE) to distinguish themselves from another group
called sophists. Sophists are known skeptics who denied that real
knowledge is possible. This contradicts the meaning of philosophy
which is the search for truth and wisdom.
c. Branches of Philosophy
Philosophy is divided into four branches and each of them answers
specific questions.
Metaphysics, the study of the ultimate nature of reality. It asks
whether there are fundamental parts which everything is made of, if
reality is completely physical or is there a non-physical aspect to it,
the nature of causation, whether actions are free or determined, and
what exists and what it means to exist.
Epistemology, the study knowledge, asks what it means for a sentence
to be true, what exactly is knowledge, how is it different from belief,
and how is it related to the truth, do we get knowledge through reason
or senses, how do we when we have it, and is it possible to really
know anything.
Ethics, the study of right or wrong. It questions the nature of value,
which actions are moral, if there really is such a thing as good or bad
or is it just a concept made by humans, and what kind of life a person
should lead.

Logic, which determines which arguments are good and bad.

III.

Conclusion
Humans have been asking philosophical questions since they started
developing a civilized society. At first, they started questioning the
human existence, life, death, and tragedy and used divine revelation to
justify reality. As time passed, some early philosophers started to
question this process and began finding ways to explain physical world
through observation, reason, and argument.