Philosophy
From EvoWiki
The word philosophy comes from the Greek word φιλοσοφια, which literally means "love of knowledge".
Its modern usage refers to any of several highly disparate fields of study tied together by a search for knowledge and understanding of first principles. That is, it is the study of the most fundamental assumptions about different aspects of reality and human thought.
People who work in philosophical disciplines are called philosophers.
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[edit] Subdisciplines
Because of its broadness, discussions of philosophy often divide it into one of several subdisciplines, such as those listed below:
- Logic or the study of how to analyze the implications of a set of axioms or assumptions.
- Epistemology or the study of the nature of human knowledge and how we determine what is known and what is not.
- Ontology or the study of existence and of what exists in reality.
- Aesthetics or the study of what is pleasing to the human mind, whether sensory like art or abstract like mathematics or story-telling.
- Ethics or the prescriptive branch of philosophy that is concerned with notions such as "right" and "wrong" and with the obligations of human beings to parts of the world external to them.
[edit] Applications
Different non-philosophical disciplines are often associated with one or more philosophical schools of thought.
[edit] Science
Science is a systematic epistemology based on theory and experimentation. Scientists formulate hypotheses (the first stage of theory) with testable predictions and then carry out experiments to help determine the truth or untruth of the hypothesis. Though experimentation is a highly precise practice, the practice of drawing ontological conclusions from it is often disputed. Some schools of thought, like Inductionism, for example, hold that positive assertions can be scientifically verified, but not falsified. On the other hand, Falsificationists, originally led by Karl Popper, make the inverse claim. They assert that science may falsify such claims, but not verify them. It should be noted that science developed from natural philosophy. [1]
[edit] Mathematics
Mathematics, or quantitative logic, is a formal system of logical axioms and inferences that they prove. Many early mathematicians, notably including the Greeks, combined logic with ontology and aesthetics in their field. They concerned themselves with postulates about fundamental truths which they felt were obvious in their own right and had a sense of symmetry or simplicity that was aesthetically pleasing. Remnants of this attitude exist today as illustrated by such things as mathematicians label a set of axioms or mathematical construct pathological. That is, nothing is wrong with the system logically, but it conflicts with prevailing aesthetic or ontological prejudices. While such concerns still tend to guide the course of mathematical research, mathematics is generally considered to be officially divorced from ontology and aesthetics and purely a matter of logic. Some philosophers of mathematics, the Platonists, consider logic to be a subset of ontology.
[edit] Religion
Different religions are often based on different ontological assumptions. Generally the common philosophical thread tying together most religions is the use of a faith-based system of epistemology as the primary justification for ontological assertions. Many philosophical systems reject faith as a useful epistemic tool, though a minority of people in the world subscribe to such systems.
Logic also plays an important role in religions that have a central text. It is central to the field of hermeneutics, or systematic interpretation, of religious texts. For example, while most Christian sects believe that the Bible contains profound truth, whether that truth must be obtained by a literal reading or by further interpretation is disagreed upon both within and among sects.
Religion is also strongly associated with ethics, and many relgious doctrines hold that ethics is a subset of ontology and that there is an objective ethical truth.
[edit] Politics
The study of government and law is concerned with every subfield of philosophy to varying degrees. Most often, though, political parties are concerned with fundamental differences in belief (ontology) or fundamental differences on what is right (ethics). For example, libertarianism holds individual freedom as one of the highest goods, while communitarianism, by contrast, places more virtue on interpersonal cooperation ,altruism and interaction with society.
Different philosophical bases in ethics and ontology are often the center of bitter disputes over the sensibility of legislation. For example, on the question "Should evolution or creationism be taught in schools?," there's many people have little ethical disagreement —they agree that the best-supported theory or theories should be taught—, but they may disagree on what these theories are, which is an ontological and/or empirical disagreement.
Also, the question of whether abortion should be legal creates fairly little ontological debate. Most people agree on what happens during embryonic development. However, whether the destruction of an embryo is the ethical equivalent of the destruction of, say, an adult person is highly disputed.
