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Philosophers are usually concerned with concepts such as existence or being, morality or goodness, knowledge, truth, and beauty; historically most philosophy has also centred on religious beliefs, or coincided with science. Philosophers may ask critical questions about the nature of these concepts, questions typically outside the scope of science, and several major works of post-medieval philosophy begin by asking what philosophy itself should or does mean. Asking what philosophy is is itself a philosophical activity, though philosophers are more often motivated by specific questions such as:
In Ancient Greek philosophyClassical (or "early") Greek philosophy focused on the role of reason and inquiry. In many ways it paved the way both to modern science and to modern philosophy. Clear unbroken lines of influence lead from early Greek philosophers, through early Muslim ph, these five broad types of questions were respectively called analytical or logicalIn ordinary language, logic is the reasoning used to reach a conclusion from a set of assumptions. More formally, logic is the study of inference—the process whereby new assertions are produced from already established ones. As such, of particular concern, epistemologicalEpistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature, origin and scope of knowledge. Definition of knowledge Justified true belief Plato's Theaetetus''. defined knowledge as justified true belief. One implication of this definition is that, ethicalEthics is a general term for what is often described as the " science of morality". In philosophy, ethical behavior is that which is " good". The Western tradition of ethics is sometimes called moral philosophy . This is one of the three major branches of, metaphysicalMetaphysics is a branch of philosophy, and related to the natural sciences, like physics, psychology and the biology of the brain; and also to mysticism, religion, and other spiritual subjects. It is notoriously difficult to define, but for purposes of br, and aestheticAesthetics (or esthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty. The word aesthetics was first used by German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who helped to establish the study of aesthetics as a separate philosophical field. They are not the only ones, and AristotleAristotle ( Greek Αριστοτλης Aristotelēs) ( 384 BCE March 7, 322 BCE) was a Greek scientist and philosopher. Along with Plato, he is often considered to be one of the two most influential philo, who was the first to use this classification, also considered politicsPolitics is the process and method of decision-making for groups of human beings. Although it is generally applied to governments, politics is also observed in all human group interactions including corporate, academic, and religious. Political science is, modern day physics, geology, biology, meteorology, and astronomy some of the other branches of philosophical investigation. The Greeks, through the influence of Socrates and his method, developed a tradition of analysis, dividing a subject into its components to understand it better.
Other traditions did not always use such labels, or emphasize the same themes. Though Hindu philosophy has similarities with Western philosophy, there was no word for philosophy in Japanese, Korean or Chinese until the 19th century, despite the presence of philosophy there over millennia. Chinese philosophers in particular had a different conception of categories from the Greeks, and their definitions were not based on common features, but were usually metaphorical and referred to several subjects at once [1]. However, there are no distinct boundaries between categories even in Western philosophy, and since at least the 19th century, Western philosophical works have more often addressed a nexus of questions without sorting them into distinct areas.