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※ 編輯: popandy 來自: 140.112.25.194 (02/04 23:13)
※ 編輯: popandy 來自: 140.112.25.194 (02/04 23:16)
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作者: popandy (pop) 看板: W-Philosophy
標題: [轉錄]
時間: Sun Feb 1 23:18:33 2004
Philosophical subdisciplines
Philosophy has many subdisciplines.
Axiology: the branch of philosophical enquiry that explores:
Aesthetics: the study of basic philosophical questions about art and beauty.
Sometimes philosophy of art is used to describe only questions about art,
with "aesthetics" the more general term. Likewise "aesthetics" sometimes
applied, even more broadly than to "philosophy of beauty", to the "sublime,"
to humour, to the frighteningto any of the responses we might expect works of
art or entertainment to elicit.
Ethics: the study of what makes actions right or wrong, and of how theories
of right action can be applied to special moral problems. Subdisciplines
include meta-ethics, value theory, theory of conduct, and applied ethics.
Economic philosophy: The branch of philosophy that addresses issues of
economic distribtuion, equality, justice, poverty and progress, from the
standpoint of first principles.
Epistemology: the study of knowledge and its nature, possibility, and
justification.
History of philosophy: the study of what philosophers up until recent times
have written, its interpretation, who influenced whom, and so forth. The bulk
of questions in history of philosophy are interpretive questions.
Logic: the study of the standards of correct argumentation. Includes formal
logic, such as Aristotelian Syllogisms and propositional logic.
Meta-philosophy: the study of philosophical method and the goals of
philosophy. The term "philosophy of philosophy" is sometimes used
more or less as a synonym.
Metaphysics (which includes ontology): the study of the most basic
categories of things, such as existence, objects, properties, causality, and
so forth. Metaphysics often is taken to include questions now studied by
other philosophical subdisciplines, such as the mind-body problem and
free will and determinism.
Philosophy of biology: the philosophical study of some basic concepts of
biology, including the notion of a species and whether biological concepts
are reducible to nonbiological concepts. Also see biosophy.
Philosophy of education: the study of the purpose and most basic methods of
education or learning.
Philosophy of history: the study of the methods by which history is derived and
accepted.
Philosophy of language: the study of the concepts of meaning and truth.
Philosophy of mathematics: the study of philosophical questions raised by
mathematics, such as, what numbers are, and what the nature and origins of
our mathematical knowledge are.
Philosophy of mind: the philosophical study of the nature of the mind, and its
relation to the body and the rest of the world.
Philosophy of perception: the philosophical study of topics related to perception;
the question what the "immediate objects" of perception are has been especially important.
Philosophy of physics: the philosophical study of some basic concepts of physics,
including space, time, and force.
Philosophy of psychology: the study of some fundamental questions about the
methods and concepts of psychology and psychiatry, such as the meaningfulness
of Freudian concepts; this is sometimes treated as including philosophy of mind.
Philosophy of religion: the study of the meaning of the concept of God and of the
rationality of belief in the existence of God.
Philosophy of science: includes not only, as subdisciplines, the "philosophies of"
the special sciences (i.e., physics, biology, etc.), but also questions about induction,
scientific method, scientific progress, etc.
Philosophy of social sciences: the philosophical study of some basic concepts,
methods, and presuppositions of social sciences such as sociology and economics.
Political philosophy: the study of basic topics concerning government, including the
purpose of the state, political justice, political freedom, the nature of law, the
justification of punishment, and paternalism.
Value theory: the study of the concept value. Also called theory of value. Sometimes
this is taken to be equivalent to axiology (a term not in as much currency in the
English-speaking world as it once was), and sometimes is taken to be, instead of
a foundational field, an overarching field including ethics, aesthetics, and political
philosophy, i.e., the philosophical subdisciplines that crucially depend on questions
of value.
Axiology, metaphysics and epistemology are what many consider the three main branches
from which all philosophical discourse stems. Logic is sometimes included as another
main branch, sometimes as a separate science usually worked on by philosophers, sometimes
just as a characteristically philosophical method applying to all the others.
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※ 編輯: popandy 來自: 140.112.25.194 (02/04 23:28)
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作者: popandy (pop) 看板: W-Philosophy
標題: [轉錄]
時間: Mon Feb 2 00:14:05 2004
How to get started in philosophy
It is a platitude (at least among people who write introductions to philosophy)
that everybody has a philosophy, though they might not all realize it or be
able to defend it. But at the same time the word "philosophy" as it is used
by philosophers is nothing like what is meant by people who say "Here's my
philosophy (of life, etc.): . . ." Such is the tension between pedagogy and
scholarship.
If you're already interested in studying philosophy, your reason might be to
improve the way you live or think somehow, or you simply wish to get
acquainted with one of the most ancient areas of human thought. On the other
hand, if you don't see what all the fuss is about, it might help to read the
motivation to philosophize, which explains what motivates many people to "do
philosophy," and get an introduction to philosophical method, which is
important to understanding how philosophers think. It might also help to
acquaint yourself with some considerations about just what philosophy is.
Those who are new to the subject of philosophy are advised to study logic,
metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology,
philosophy of science, ethics, and political philosophy as these are -
arguably - the central disciplines.
Applied philosophy
Philosophy has applications. The most obvious applications are those in ethics
,applied ethics in particular--and in political philosophy. The political
philosophies of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill
, and John Rawls have shaped and been used to justify governments and their
actions. Philosophy of education deserves special mention, as well;
progressive education as championed by John Dewey has had a profound impact
on educational practices in the United States in the twentieth century.
Other important, but less immediate applications can be found in epistemology,
which might help one to regulate one's notions of what knowledge, evidence,
and justified belief are. Philosophy of science discusses the underpinnings
of the scientific method, among other topics sometimes useful to scientists.
Aesthetics can help to interpret discussions of art. Even ontology, surely
the most abstract and least practical-seeming branch of philosophy, has had
important consequences for logic and computer science. In general, the various
"philosophies of," such as philosophy of law, can provide workers in their
respective fields with a deeper understanding of the theoretical or conceptual
underpinnings of their fields.
Moreover, recently, there has been developing a burgeoning profession devoted
to applying philosophy to the problems of ordinary life: philosophical
counseling.
Philosophy contrasted with other disciplines
Natural Science
Originally the term "philosophy" was applied to all intellectual endeavour.
Aristotle studied what would now be called biology, meterology, physics,
and cosmology, alongside his metaphysics and ethics. Even in the eighteenth
century physics and chemistry were still classified as "natural philosophy",
that is, the philosophical study of nature. Today these latter subjects are
referred to as science.
Psychology, economics, sociology, and linguistics were once the domain of
philosophers insofar as they were studied at all, but now have only a weaker
connection with the field. In the late twentieth century cognitive science
and artificial intelligence could be seen as being forged in part out of
"philosophy of mind."
Philosophy is done a priori. It does not and cannot rely on experiment
. However, in some ways philosophy is close to science in its character and
method; Analytic philosophy urges that philosophers should emulate the
methods of natural science; Quine holds that philosophy just is a branch
of natural science, simply the most abstract one. This approach, common
nowadays, is called "philosophical naturalism"
Philosophers have always devoted some study to science and the
scientific method, and to logic, and this involves, indirectly, studying
the subject matters of those sciences. Whether philosophy also has its own,
distinct subject matter is a contentious point. Traditionally ethics,
aesthetics, and metaphysics have all been philosophical subjects, but many
philosophers have, especially in the twentieth century, rejected these as
futile questions (the Vienna Circle). Philosophy has also concerned itself
with explaining the foundations and character knowledge in general (of
science, or history), and in this case it would be a sort of "science of
science" but some now hold that this cannot consist in any more than
clarifying the arguments and claims of other sciences. This suggests that
philosophy might be the study of meaning and reasoning generally; but some
still would claim either that this is not a science, or that if it is,
it ought not to be pursued by philosophers.
All these views have something in common: whatever philosophy
essentially is or is concerned with, it tends on the whole to proceed more
"abstractly" than most (or most other) natural sciences. It does not depend
as much on experience and experiment, and does not contribute as directly
to technology. It clearly would be a mistake to identify philosophy with
any one natural science; whether it can be identified with science very
broadly construed is still an open question.
Philosophy of Science
This is an active discipline pursued by both trained philosophers and
scientists. Philosophers often refer to, and interpret, experimental work
of various kinds (as in philosophy of physics and philosophy of psychology).
But this is not surprising: such branches of philosophy aim at philosophical
understanding of experimental work. It is not the philosophers in their
capacity as philosophers, who perform the experiments and formulate the
scientific theories under study. Philosophy of science should not be
confused with science it studies any more than biology should be confused
with plants and animals.
Theology and Religious studies
Like philosophy, most religious studies, are not experimental. Parts of
theology, including questions about the existence and nature of gods,
clearly overlap with philosophy of religion. Aristotle considered theology
a branch of metaphysics, the central field of philosophy, and most
philosophers prior to the twentieth century have devoted significant effort
to theological questions. So the two are not unrelated. But other part of
religious studies, such as the comparison of different world religions, can
be easily distinguished from philosophy in just the way that any other
social science can be distinguished from philosophy. These are closer to
history and sociology, and involve specific observations of particular
phenomena, here particular religious practices.
Nowadays religion plays a very marginal role in philosophy. The
empiricist tradition in modern philosophy often held that religious
questions are beyond the scope of human knowledge, and many have claimed
that religious language is literally meaningless: there are not even
questions to be answered. Some philosophers have felt that these
difficulties in evidence were irrelevant, and have argued for, against,
or just about religious beliefs on moral or other grounds. Nonetheless,
in the main stream of twentieth century philosophy there are very few
philosophers who give serious consideration to religious questions.
Mathematics
Math uses very specific, rigorous methods of proof that philosophers
sometimes (only rarely) try to emulate. Most philosophy is written in
ordinary prose, and while it strives to be precise it does not usually
attain anything like mathematical clarity. As a result, mathematicians
hardly ever disagree about results, while philosophers of course do
disagree about their results, as well as their methods.
The Philosophy of mathematics is a branch of philosophy of science;
but in many ways mathematics has a special relationship to philosophy. This
is because the study of logic is a central branch of philosophy, and
mathematics is a paradigm example of logic. In the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries logic made great advances, and mathematics has been
proven to be reducible to logic (at least, to first-order logic with some
set theory). The use of formal, mathematical logic in philosophy now
resembles the use of math in science, although it is not as frequent.
Some tentative generalizations about what philosophy is
So philosophy, it seems, is a discipline that draws on knowledge that the
average educated person has, and it does not make use of experimentation and
careful observation, though it may interpret philosophical aspects of
experiment and observation.
More positively, one might say that philosophy is a discipline that
examines the meaning and justification of certain of our most basic,
fundamental beliefs, according to a loose set of general methods. But what
we might mean by the words "basic, fundamental beliefs"?
A belief is fundamental if it concerns those aspects of the universe
which are most commonly found, which are found everywhere: the universal
aspects of things. Philosophy studies, for example, what existence itself
is. It also studies valuethe goodness of things--in general. Surely in human
life we find the relevance of value or goodness everywhere, not just moral
goodness, though that might be very important, but even more generally,
goodness in the sense of anything that is actually desirable, the sense,
for example, in which an apple, a painting, and a person can all be good.
(If indeed there is a single sense in which they are all called "good.")
Of course, physics and the other sciences study some very universal
aspects of things; but it does so experimentally. Philosophy studies those
aspects that can be studied without experimentation. Those are aspects of
things that are very general indeed; to take yet another example,
philosophers ask what physical objects as such are, as distinguished from
properties of objects and relations between objects, and perhaps also as
distinguished from minds or souls. Physicists proceed as though the notion
of a physical body is quite clear and straightforwardwhich perhaps in the end
it will found to be--but at any rate, physics assumes that, and then asks
questions about how all physical bodies behave, and then does experiments to
find out the answers.
Quotes
"Science is what we know and philosophy is what we don't know."
- Bertrand Russell
"What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the
fly-bottle." - Ludwig Wittgenstein
"Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing."
- Ambrose Bierce
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