Philosophy addresses big questions in ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and logic. It historically overlapped with science and the humanities. Socrates developed the Socratic method. Ethics debates objective morality and relativism. Metaphysics looks at first causes and principles. Epistemology studies knowledge roots. Logic is important in many disciplines and may lead to a logic machine.
The goal of philosophy is to address the “big questions” that do not fall into other disciplines: how people should act (ethics), what exists (metaphysics), how individuals know what they know (epistemology), and how people they should reason ( logic). Originally from Greek, the word means “love of wisdom.”
Historically, philosophy has been a panacea for academic subjects that fall outside the traditional disciplines of science and the humanities. This does not mean that it is disconnected from these areas, however, and indeed the relationship between this field and science is almost as close as the relationship between mathematics and science, and many literary masters have also started philosophical movements. Many academic disciplines have a corresponding philosophy behind them. Less formally, it’s just a way of thinking about something.
The discipline is thought to have truly begun under Socrates, an ancient Greek philosopher who is often regarded as the most famous and important philosopher of all time. He developed the Socratic method, a general technique for examining philosophical problems based on definition, analysis and synthesis. 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,” a way of thinking about the world.
In the field of ethics, people may consider questions such as whether it is ethical to save a killer’s life, whether he can kill again. Philosophers debate such matters for hours, creating doctrines to help organize and justify their opinions. Within the domain of ethics, there is disagreement over whether or not there is an objective morality: an objectively correct way of doing things that is superior to any other. At the other end of the spectrum, a philosopher may ask if everything is relative. If morality is arbitrary, why should people have one?
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, such as “how did the universe come about?” they have fallen into the domain of science, revealing themselves through hypotheses and experiments. Some metaphysical questions, however, may not have scientific answers. Some scientists would argue that an unscientific answer to such questions is no answer at all.
Epistemology looks at the roots of knowledge. Since the human mind is only representations of the external world rather than perfect reflections of it, how can people know anything outside our own 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.
Logic is what started mathematics and 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 creating more intelligent software programs. One day, studies in logic may lead to a design for a logic machine.
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