The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to philosophy:
Philosophy – study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language.[1][2] It is distinguished from other ways of addressing fundamental questions (such as mysticism, myth, or the arts) by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational argument.[3] The word "Philosophy" comes from the Greek philosophia (φιλοσοφία), which literally means "love of wisdom".[4][5][6]
Core areas of philosophy
The core areas of philosophy are:
- Aesthetics – study of the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and the creation of personal kinds of truth
- Epistemology – study of the nature and scope of knowledge and belief
- Ethics – study of the right, the good, and the valuable. Includes study of applied ethics
- Logic – study of good reasoning, by examining the validity of arguments and documenting their fallacies
- Metaphysics – study of the state of being and the nature of reality
Fields of philosophy
The branches of philosophy are divided into the many fields of philosophy:
Ethics
Ethics – study of the right, the good, and the valuable
- Applied ethics – philosophical examination, from a moral standpoint, of particular issues in private and public life that are matters of moral judgment. It is thus the attempts to use philosophical methods to identify the morally correct course of action in various fields of human life.
- Decision ethics – ethical theories and ethical decision processes
- Environmental ethics – studies ethical issues concerning the non-human world. It exerts influence on a large range of disciplines including environmental law, environmental sociology, ecotheology, ecological economics, ecology and environmental geography.
- Professional ethics – ethics to improve professionalism
- Computer ethics – deals with how computing professionals should make decisions regarding professional and social conduct
- Ethics of artificial intelligence – specific to robots and other artificially intelligent beings.
- Research ethics – application of fundamental ethical principles to a variety of topics involving research, including scientific research.
- Computer ethics – deals with how computing professionals should make decisions regarding professional and social conduct
- Bioethics – study of the typically controversial ethical issues emerging from new situations and possibilities brought about by advances in biology and medicine.
- Medical ethics – ethics to improve our basic health needs
- Business ethics – individual based morals to improve ethics in a business environment
- Organizational ethics – ethics among organizations
- Social ethics – ethics among nations and as one global unit
- Descriptive ethics – study of people's beliefs about morality
- Normative ethics – study of ethical theories that prescribe how people ought to act
- Metaethics – branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments
Metaphysics
Metaphysics – traditional branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world that encompasses it. Metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms: "What is ultimately there?" and, "What is it like?"
- Ontology – philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations.
- Philosophy of mind – studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness, and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain.
- Philosophy of space and time – branch of philosophy concerned with the issues surrounding the ontology, epistemology, and character of space and time.
- Philosophy of action – theories about the processes causing willful human bodily movements of a more or less complex kind. This area of thought has attracted the strong interest of philosophers ever since Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Third Book).
Logic
Logic –
Other
- Political philosophy
- Philosophy of language
- Philosophy of religion
- Philosophy of science
- Meta-philosophy
- Philosophy of law
- Philosophy of education
- Philosophy of history
- Philosophy of mathematics
History of philosophy
History of philosophy – study of philosophical ideas and concepts through time. Issues specifically related to history of philosophy might include (but are not limited to): How can changes in philosophy be accounted for historically? What drives the development of thought in its historical context? To what degree can philosophical texts from prior historical eras be understood even today?
Ancient philosophy
Western philosophy
Eastern philosophy
Contemporary philosophy
Philosophical theories
Major traditions in philosophy
Philosophical movements
Ancient
Medieval |
Modern |
Philosophies by branch
Aesthetics
Epistemology
- Coherentism
- Constructivist epistemology
- Contextualism
- Embodied cognition
- Empiricism
- Fallibilism
- Foundationalism
- Holism
- Infinitism
- Innatism
- Internalism and externalism
- Naïve realism
- Naturalized epistemology
- Objectivist epistemology
- Phenomenalism
- Positivism
- Reductionism
- Reliabilism
- Representative realism
- Rationalism
- Situated cognition
- Skepticism
- Theory of Forms
- Transcendental idealism
- Uniformitarianism
Ethics
- Consequentialism
- Deontology
- Virtue ethics
- Moral realism
- Moral relativism
- Error theory
- Non-cognitivism
- Ethical Egoism
Logic
- Classical logic
- Intermediate logic
- Intuitionistic logic
- Minimal logic
- Relevant logic
- Affine logic
- Linear logic
- Ordered logic
- Dialetheism
Metaphysics
- Anti-realism
- Cartesian dualism
- Free will
- Materialism
- Meaning of life
- Idealism
- Existentialism
- Essentialism
- Libertarianism
- Determinism
- Naturalism
- Monism
- Platonic idealism
- Hindu idealism
- Phenomenalism
- Nihilism
- Realism
- Physicalism
- MOQ
- Relativism
- Scientific realism
- Solipsism
- Subjectivism
- Substance theory
- Type theory
Political philosophy
Philosophy of language
- Causal theory of reference
- Contrast theory of meaning
- Contrastivism
- Conventionalism
- Cratylism
- Deconstruction
- Descriptivist theory of names
- Direct reference theory
- Dramatism
- Expressivism
- Linguistic determinism
- Logical atomism
- Logical positivism
- Mediated reference theory
- Nominalism
- Non-cognitivism
- Phallogocentrism
- Quietism
- Relevance theory
- Semantic externalism
- Semantic holism
- Structuralism
- Supposition theory
- Symbiosism
- Theological noncognitivism
- Theory of descriptions
- Verification theory
Philosophy of mind
- Behaviourism
- Biological naturalism
- Disjunctivism
- Dualism
- Eliminative materialism
- Emergent materialism
- Enactivism
- Epiphenomenalism
- Functionalism
- Identity theory
- Idealism
- Interactionism
- Materialism
- Monism
- Neutral monism
- Panpsychism
- Phenomenalism
- Phenomenology
- Physicalism
- Property dualism
- Representational theory of mind
- Sense-datum theory
- Solipsism
- Substance dualism
- Qualia theory
Philosophy of religion
- Theories of religion
- Acosmism
- Agnosticism
- Animism
- Antireligion
- Atheism
- Dharmism
- Deism
- Divine command theory
- Dualism
- Esotericism
- Exclusivism
- Existentialism
- Feminist theology
- Fideism
- Fundamentalism
- Gnosticism
- Henotheism
- Humanism
- Inclusivism
- Monism
- Monotheism
- Mysticism
- Naturalism
- New Age
- Nondualism
- Nontheism
- Pandeism
- Pantheism
- Perennialism
- Polytheism
- Process theology
- Spiritualism
- Shamanism
- Taoic
- Theism
- Transcendentalism
Religious philosophy
- Buddhist philosophy
- Christian philosophy
- Hindu philosophy
- Islamic philosophy
- Jain philosophy
- Jewish philosophy
Philosophy of science
- Confirmation holism
- Coherentism
- Contextualism
- Conventionalism
- Deductive-nomological model
- Determinism
- Empiricism
- Fallibilism
- Foundationalism
- Hypothetico-deductive model
- Infinitism
- Instrumentalism
- Positivism
- Pragmatism
- Rationalism
- Received view of theories
- Reductionism
- Semantic view of theories
- Scientific realism
- Scientism
- Scientific anti-realism
- Skepticism
- Uniformitarianism
- Vitalism
Philosophical literature
- Blackwell Companion to Philosophy
- A History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell
- A History of Philosophy, by Frederick Copleston
Reference works
- Encyclopedia of Philosophy – one of the major English encyclopedias of philosophy. The second edition, edited by Donald M. Borchert, was published in ten volumes in 2006 by Thomson Gale. Volumes 1–9 contain alphabetically ordered articles.
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy – free online encyclopedia on philosophical topics and philosophers founded by James Fieser in 1995. The current general editors are James Fieser (Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee at Martin) and Bradley Dowden (Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Sacramento). The staff also includes numerous area editors as well as volunteers.
- Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy – encyclopedia of philosophy edited by Edward Craig that was first published by Routledge in 1998 (ISBN 978-0415073103). Originally published in both 10 volumes of print and as a CD-ROM, in 2002 it was made available online on a subscription basis. The online version is regularly updated with new articles and revisions to existing articles. It has 1,300 contributors providing over 2,000 scholarly articles.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – combines an online encyclopedia of philosophy with peer reviewed publication of original papers in philosophy, freely-accessible to internet users. Each entry is written and maintained by an expert in the field, including professors from many academic institutions worldwide.
Philosophers
See also
- Outline of philosophy of artificial intelligence
- List of important publications in philosophy
- Lists of philosophy topics (index)
- Index of philosophy of science articles
- Unsolved problems in philosophy
References
- ^ Jenny Teichmann and Katherine C. Evans, Philosophy: A Beginner's Guide (Blackwell Publishing, 1999), p. 1: "Philosophy is a study of problems which are ultimate, abstract and very general. These problems are concerned with the nature of existence, knowledge, morality, reason and human purpose."
- ^ A.C. Grayling, Philosophy 1: A Guide through the Subject (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 1: "The aim of philosophical inquiry is to gain insight into questions about knowledge, truth, reason, reality, meaning, mind, and value."
- ^ Anthony Quinton, in T. Honderich (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 666: "Philosophy is rationally critical thinking, of a more or less systematic kind about the general nature of the world (metaphysics or theory of existence), the justification of belief (epistemology or theory of knowledge), and the conduct of life (ethics or theory of value). Each of the three elements in this list has a non-philosophical counterpart, from which it is distinguished by its explicitly rational and critical way of proceeding and by its systematic nature. Everyone has some general conception of the nature of the world in which they live and of their place in it. Metaphysics replaces the unargued assumptions embodied in such a conception with a rational and organized body of beliefs about the world as a whole. Everyone has occasion to doubt and question beliefs, their own or those of others, with more or less success and without any theory of what they are doing. Epistemology seeks by argument to make explicit the rules of correct belief formation. Everyone governs their conduct by directing it to desired or valued ends. Ethics, or moral philosophy, in its most inclusive sense, seeks to articulate, in rationally systematic form, the rules or principles involved."
- ^ Philosophia, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, at Perseus
- ^ Online Etymology Dictionary
- ^ The definition of philosophy is: "1.orig., love of, or the search for, wisdom or knowledge 2.theory or logical analysis of the principles underlying conduct, thought, knowledge, and the nature of the universe". Webster's New World Dictionary (Second College ed.).
External links
- Taxonomy of Philosophy – topic outline developed by David Chalmers as the category structure for the table of contents of the PhilPapers academic directory.
- PhilPapers – comprehensive directory of online philosophical articles and books.
- Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names
- EpistemeLinks: Philosophy Resources on the Internet
- Guide to Philosophy on the Internet
- The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- The Ism Book
- Introducing Philosophy Series. By Paul Newall (for beginners)
- Philosophical positions (philosophy, movement, school, theory, etc.)
- The Problems of Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell (links provided to full text)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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