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  1. en.wikipedia.org › wiki › PhilosophyPhilosophy - Wikipedia

    Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, value, mind, and language. It is a rational and critical inquiry that reflects on its own methods and assumptions. Historically, many of the individual sciences, such as physics and ...

    • What Does Philosophy Mean?
    • How Is Philosophy done?
    • How Can We Think Clearly About Thinking?
    • So, Philosophy Just Rests on ‘Arguments’?
    • The 4 CORE Branches of Philosophy
    • Who Does Philosophy?
    • Continue Learning

    The word ‘philosophy’ literally means ‘love of wisdom’, and this etymology is apt, for as a subject philosophy generally refers to the study of deep, fundamental questions (like those we opened with) relating to core aspects of the human condition. These questions typically revolve around the nature of existence, knowledge, consciousness, ethics, s...

    Considering such difficult, fuzzy subject matter, we might wonder how philosophers get anything done. How does philosophy make progress? How do philosophers decide what’s accurate and inaccurate? Well, it essentially comes down to thinking hard about thinking, and separating out the sound thinking from the erroneous thinking. As the philosopher Tho...

    In order to separate good thinking from bad thinking, philosophy essentially runs on what philosophers call ‘arguments’, i.e. chains of reasoning that support certain conclusions. There are a whole host of ways in which arguments can be presented and structured. They can be informal, like persuading a friend to go to a certain restaurant, or a poli...

    Compared to the grand instruments of modern science, the humble arguments of philosophers may not seem a very impressive toolkit. But, when you think about it, it is upon such deployments of reason that all human knowledge is built. The ability to formulate and respond to rational arguments is — arguably — among humanity’s most powerful intellectua...

    While philosophical inquiry can be (and has been) applied to virtually any subject, one traditional picture organizes philosophy into four core branches. These are the branches of epistemology (the study of knowledge), metaphysics (the study of reality), value theory (the study of ethics and values), and logic(the study of correct reasoning). The p...

    As we’ve seen, the concerns of philosophy are both deep and wide-ranging. There may be some areas that interest you, there may be others you find a little dry* (*cough, logic, cough). Either way, philosophers have been studying the difficult questions mentioned above for thousands of years. The ancient Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristo...

    If you’re interested in learning more about philosophy, check out our follow-up piece, Why Is Philosophy Important Today, and How Can It Improve Your Life?, as well as our bite-size Life’s Big Questions course, which distills the great philosophers’ answers to some of life’s most difficult and enduring questions: Why does anything exist? Is percept...

  2. www.philosophy-foundation.org › what-is-philosophyWhat is Philosophy?

    Philosophy is a way of thinking about certain subjects such as ethics, thought, existence, time, meaning and value. That 'way of thinking' involves 4 Rs: r esponsiveness, r eflection, r eason and r e-evaluation. The aim is to deepen understanding. The hope is that by doing philosophy we learn to think better, to act more wisely, and thereby ...

  3. Jun 2, 2015 · Word meaning has played a somewhat marginal role in early contemporary philosophy of language, which focused more on the compositional processes whereby words combine to form meaningful sentences, rather than on their individual meanings (see the entry on compositionality). Nowadays, there is widespread consensus that the study of word meaning ...

  4. The word philosophy derives from ancient Greek, in which the philosopher is a lover or pursuer (philia) of wisdom (sophia). But the earliest Greek philosophers were not known as philosophers; they were simply known as sages. The sage tradition provides an early glimpse of philosophical thought in action.

  5. Jan 26, 2010 · 1. Two Kinds of Theory of Meaning. In “General Semantics”, David Lewis wrote. I distinguish two topics: first, the description of possible languages or grammars as abstract semantic systems whereby symbols are associated with aspects of the world; and, second, the description of the psychological and sociological facts whereby a particular one of these abstract semantic systems is the one ...

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  7. Sep 15, 2024 · philosophy, (from Greek, by way of Latin, philosophia, “love of wisdom”) the rational, abstract, and methodical consideration of reality as a whole or of fundamental dimensions of human existence and experience. Philosophical inquiry is a central element in the intellectual history of many civilizations. The subject of philosophy is treated ...

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