INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?

Presented by

William M. Kapambwe

January, 2011 to April, 2011

 OUTLINE
1.0 Goal of philosophy?
2.0 Meaning of Philosophy
3.0 Origins of Philosophy
4.0 Branches of Philosophy
5.0 Ethics
6.0 Metaphysics
7.0 Epistemology
8.0 Logic
9.0 History of Philosophers
10.0 Characteristics of Philosohy
11.0 Integration of Different Philosophical Branches
12.0 Demands of philosophical Studies
13.0 Rewards of Philosophy
1.0 WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?
The goal of philosophy is to address the big questions which
do not fall into other disciplines: how we should act (ethics),
what exists (metaphysics), how we know what we know
(epistemology), and how we should reason (logic). Originating
from Greek, the word philosophy means love of wisdom.
Historically, philosophy has been a catch-all for academic
subjects which dont fit into the traditional disciplines of
science and the humanities. However, this doesnt mean it is
disconnected from these areas: in fact, the relationship of
philosophy and science is almost as close as the relationship
between math and science, and many masters of literature
have also started philosophical movements.
Many academic disciplines have a corresponding philosophy
behind them: philosophy of science, for instance, or philosophy
of history. Less formally, a philosophy is just a way of thinking
about something.
 ORIGINS OF PHILOSOPHY
Philosophy is thought to have truly begun under
Socrates, an ancient Greek philosopher who is
considered the most famous and important
philosopher of all time. He developed the
Socratic method, a general technique for looking
at philosophical problems based on definition,
analysis, and synthesis. Back in Socrates time
and up until the Scientific Revolution in the 17th
century, philosophy and science were often
practiced by the same people and considered two
parts of the same discipline. Science was called
natural philosophy philosophy about the
world.
 Philosophy is thought to have truly begun under
Socrates, an ancient Greek philosopher who is
considered the most famous and important philosopher
of all time.
He developed the Socratic method, a general
technique for looking at philosophical problems based
on definition, analysis, and synthesis. Back in Socrates
time and up until the Scientific Revolution in the 17th
century, philosophy and science were often practiced
by the same people and considered two parts of the
same discipline. Science was called natural
philosophy philosophy about the world.
 ETHICS
In the domain of ethics, consider questions like the following: is it
ethical to save the life of a murderer, if he may kill again?
Philosophers debate such questions for hours, creating doctrines to
help organize and justify their own opinions.
Within the domain of ethics, there is disagreement about whether or
not there exists an objective morality: an objectively correct way to do
things that is superior to any other. At the opposite end of the
spectrum: is everything relative? If morality is arbitrary, why should
we have one at all?
Ethics is the study of the nature of right and wrong and good and
evil, in terms both of considerations about the foundations of morality,
and of practical considerations about the fine details of moral conduct.
Moral philosophers may investigate questions as sweeping as
whether there are such things moral facts at all, or as focused as
whether or not the law ought to accord to rape victims the right to an
abortion.
 METAPHYSICS
Metaphysics looks at the first causes and principles of things, as
well as the relationship between consciousness and the world.
Many questions previously considered metaphysical, like how
did the universe come into existence? have fallen into the
domain of science, being revealed through hypotheses and
experiment. Some metaphysical questions, however, may not
have scientific answers. Some scientists would argue back that a
non-scientific answer to such questions is not really an answer
at all.
Metaphysics is the study of the nature of things. Metaphysicians
ask what kinds of things exist, and what they are like. They
reason about such things as whether or not people have free
will, in what sense abstract objects can be said to exist, and how
it is that brains are able to generate minds.
 EPISTEMOLOGY
Epistemology looks at the roots of knowledge. Since
our minds are just representations of the external
world rather than perfect reflections of it, how can
we know anything outside of our minds? Answering
this question is the responsibility of epistemology.
Like metaphysics, epistemology often overlaps with
science or statistics, especially in the area of
probability theory.
Epistemology is the study of knowledge itself.
Epistemologists ask, for instance, what criteria must
be satisfied for something we believe to count as
something we know, and even what it means for a
proposition to be true.
 LOGIC
Logic is what kickstarted mathematics, and it continues
to play an important role in many disciplines. Through
probability theory, logic can be formalized in a more
quantitative way, and these findings have been applied
to the creation of more intelligent software programs.
One day, studies in logic may lead to a design for a
logical machine.
Logic is the attempt to codify the rules of rational
thought. Logicians explore the structure of arguments
that preserve truth or allow the optimal extraction of
knowledge from evidence. Logic is one of the primary
tools philosophers use in their inquiries; the precision of
logic helps them to cope with the subtlety of
philosophical problems and the often misleading nature
of conversational language.
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHERS
Presumably, the first philosophers/thinkers conducted
their inquiries through reason and observation, rather
than through tradition or revelation. These thinkers
were the first philosophers. Although this picture is
admittedly simplistic, the basic distinction has stuck:
philosophy in its most primeval form is considered
nothing less than secular inquiry itself.
However, there are now many forms of secular inquiry,
so what distinguishes philosophy from them? In the
beginning, there was perhaps no distinction. But, as
civilization advanced, two parts of philosophy became so
powerful in their own right that they separated off,
claiming for themselves the status of independent
disciplines.
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
Mathematics was the first, and split off very early in
the game; science (or natural philosophy, as it was
called even into the nineteenth century) was the
second, splitting off much later. To modern philosophy
is left whatever questions these two disciplines cannot
solve (at least at a given time), including not only
questions that are traditionally thought to be beyond
the two (e.g. "What is the meaning of life?"), but also
theoretical questions at their fringes (e.g. "Can natural
selection operate at the species level?") and conceptual
questions at their foundations (e.g. "What is science?").
Philosophy, of course, is best known for the first class
of questions, which includes some of the most difficult
and important questions there are, such as whether or
not there is a god, how one can know anything at all,
and how a person ought to live.
 CHARACTERISTICS OF PHILOSOPHY
Philosophy is characterized as much by its methods as
by its subject matter. Although philosophers deal with
speculative issues that generally are not subject to
investigation through experimental test, and philosophy
therefore is more fully conceptual than science,
philosophy properly done is not mere speculation.
Philosophers, just like scientists, formulate hypotheses
which ultimately must answer to reason and evidence.
This is one of the things that differentiates philosophy
from poetry and mysticism, despite its not being a
science.
OVERLAP OF DIFFERENT BRANCHES OF
PHILOSOPHY
As you can tell, the different branches of philosophy overlap one
another. A philosopher considering whether people ought to give
excess wealth to the poor is asking an ethical question.
However, his investigations might lead him to wonder whether or not
standards of right and wrong are built into the fabric of the universe,
which is a metaphysical question.
If he claims that people are justified in taking a particular stance on
that question, he is making at least a tacit epistemological claim.
At every step in his reasoning, he will want to employ logic to
minimize the chance of being led into error by the great complexity
and obscurity of the questions. He may very well look to some of the
ethical, metaphysical, and epistemological writings of past
philosophers to see how his brightest predecessors reasoned about the
matter.
 DEMANDS OF STUDYING PHILOSOPHY
Philosophical inquiry is very demanding, suitable only
for those who possess a fair degree of courage, humility,
patience and discipline.
Doing philosophy requires courage, because one never
knows what one will find at the end of a philosophical
investigation. Since philosophy deals with the most
fundamental and important issues of human existence,
and since these are things that most people initially
take for granted, genuine philosophical inquiry has
great potential to unsettle or even to destroy one's
deepest and most cherished beliefs.
Genuine philosophical inquiry also carries the risk of
isolation among one's peers, both for the unorthodox
views to which it may lead one, and for the simple
unpopularity of critical thinking. A philosopher must
be able to face both consequences.
DEMANDS OF PHILOSOPHY
Doing philosophy requires humility, because to do philosophy
one must always keep firmly in mind how little one knows and
how easy it is to fall into error. The very initiation of
philosophical inquiry requires one to admit to oneself that one
may not, after all, have all of the answers.
Doing philosophy requires both patience and discipline, because
philosophical inquiry requires long hours of hard work. One
must be prepared to commit huge amounts of time to laboring
over issues both difficult and subtle.
People who avoid philosophy often complain that thinking about
philosophical questions makes their heads hurt. This is
unavoidable: if the answers come easily to you, your inquiries
are almost certainly superficial. To do philosophy, one must
commit oneself to pain. The only difference between one who
chooses to shoulder the pain and one who does not is that the
former recognizes that there is no shortcut to truth: every
advance must be fought for tooth and nail.
Demands of Philosophy
These virtues are always imperfectly
represented in any given person, which
is why philosophy is best done in a
community: the critical scrutiny of
other thinkers provides an often
necessary check on defects invisible to
one's own eyes.
 REWARDS OF PHILOSOPHY
But if philosophy is so demanding, why should anyone even
bother with it?
In the first place, there is great utility in philosophical inquiry,
even for someone who does not innately care about the pursuit of
truth. Consider a random handful of classic philosophical
questions: What is the meaning of life? What is the nature of
justice? What does it take for a belief to be justified? Is the world
we see illusion or reality? The answers to such questions cannot
help but to have a critical impact on how one ought to live one's
life. Surely one should subject one's intuitive beliefs about these
things to critical scrutiny, and work hard to come as close to truth
as possible. Many philosophical questions are fundamental to
human life; the only reason it often does not seem that way is that
people simply assume they know what the answers to these
questions are, without ever daring to make a serious inquiry.
 REWARDS OF PHILOSOPHY

This leads us to the second reason why one ought to do philosophy:

to understand is ennobling. To go through life simply assuming one
understands, is not. To be sure, one can perhaps be happy, at least
in the same way as a well-fed dog is happy, if one manages to make
it all the way through life without questioning anything.
Philosophical inquiry, on the other hand, can be disquieting,
offering no guarantee that your hard work will yield the conclusions
you hope for. Even worse, philosophy gives you no guarantee that
your investigations will yield any conclusion at all: at the end of the
day, you may find yourself not only minus the certainties with which
you began, but also with nothing else to put in their place. If you do
philosophy, you may well have to learn to live with perpetual
uncertainty, while others, in their ignorance, happily profess perfect
knowledge of things they do not understand at all.
But it is clear who has the better life: far better to understand, even
if the main thing you understand is the limit of your own knowledge.
10.0 CONCLUSION
And a final reason for studying philosophy is that,
for all of the pains and difficulties associated with
it, the pursuit and acquisition of knowledge is
enjoyable. To be sure, it is a refined enjoyment,
and it is often hard to see from the outside what
the appeal is.
But once you become immersed in it, it carries its
own immediate rewards, and it is difficult to resist
becoming addicted to it. Amongst may pleasures
experienced, it is claimed by philosophers that,
none of them hold a candle to the pleasures of the
mind: the sheer pleasure of studying and
investigating, and sometimes even understanding.
Nagel T. 1987. What Does It All Mean? Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Warburton N. 2006. Philosophy: The Classics: Third edition

. New York: Routledge.