what is philosophy?

[hard]

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=5IG1IAzSC0U&feature=related

[xXNovaxX]

The following notes are one I got from a lecturer

Definition/What is Philosophy? Philosophy is the use of reason and argument in seeking fundamental truth and the knowledge of reality-especially in relation to things, existence, the Universe, events, and human behaviour

Philosophy is concerned with ALL of life and asks very DEEP questions.

A Doctor might ask:
"What is causing this person pain? And how can I fix it?

A Philosopher might ask:
"Is there realy such a thing as pain, since only I can feel it, and not someone else?"
"How do we know that pain is pain, and not pleasure?"
"Where does pain come from?"
"If God is good, why does pain exist in the world?"

The word Philosopher means "a person who loves wisdom"
Philosophy literally means "the love of wisdom" (and is a combination of Greek Words)

Branches of Philosophy

• Metaphysics: The study of nature of ultimate reality
• Epistemology:The study of knowledge

• Theology:The study of God and religion
• The study of logic and language

• The study of the philosophy of science
• The study of ethics

What do Philosophers do?
Philosophers try to ask very important questions about life, truth and reality; They then try to answer these questions-this always involves very careful thinking

What is the starting point for a Philosopher?
It's always a question, or a topic of interest. The question may be one that a lot of people want to answer, or one that the philosopher knows is important

Sometimes, this topic is called a THESIS

Epistemology
As aforementioned, is concerned with knowledge.

There are many epistemological questions. For example:
*Does anyone know everything there is to know? e.g. my teacher?
*Where does knowledge come from?
*What is knowledge? Can knowledge be a dream, or a memory, or a thought?

Yes, I do notice this thread is 1 years old lol, but nobody posts and I was going to start a new thread anyway but Over9000 had the name I was going to use anyway.

[Eriny]

It's interesting because when you say philosophy means 'the love of wisdom' in Ancient philosophy, this was meant to mean that philosophers love wisdom, and wanted to gain wisdom but equally knew that they were not wise. So, their entire lives were spent in the pursuit of wisdom. Philosophy wasn't just a discipline but a way of living.

I remember being told that part of philosophy is defining what philosophy is, so there isn't really any obvious answer (although Nova's post is correct). There is a lot of discourse which talks about what philosophy should do and what it should explore. The existentialists often examined this overtly, but they come from a long line of philosophers who wanted us to gain an understanding of the broader picture of philosophy - what it does, and how to do it. The empiricists, for example, argued that we should assume that the things we see around us describe reality (unlike the Cartesian legacy, which states that we can't know anything beyond the content of our minds) and by arguing this, they also implicitly argued that philosophy shouldn't stray into non-empiricism because they thought that it was outright unintelligible.

[shameless plug] If you're interested in this sort of stuff, I've written a few columns about philosophy generally in lip magazine (http://lipmag.com/) [/shameless plug]