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Aug 5, 2020 · Personally, most scientists I know consider such reflections part and parcel of their scientific work; while not trained philosophers, they are still philosophical about their topics. Even more interestingly, philosophy can play a huge role in everyday life.
Oct 19, 2023 · Q: What does it mean to have a good life? [Jules Evans] I’m from a tradition called virtue ethics in philosophy, which is this idea that philosophy can help people flourish, and that in some sense, the aim of human life is flourishing. Individual flourishing, flourishing societies and also flourishing nature.
- What Does Philosophy Mean?
- How Is Philosophy done?
- How Can We Think Clearly About Thinking?
- So, Philosophy Just Rests on ‘Arguments’?
- The 4 CORE Branches of Philosophy
- Who Does Philosophy?
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The word ‘philosophy’ literally means ‘love of wisdom’, and this etymology is apt, for as a subject philosophy generally refers to the study of deep, fundamental questions (like those we opened with) relating to core aspects of the human condition. These questions typically revolve around the nature of existence, knowledge, consciousness, ethics, s...
Considering such difficult, fuzzy subject matter, we might wonder how philosophers get anything done. How does philosophy make progress? How do philosophers decide what’s accurate and inaccurate? Well, it essentially comes down to thinking hard about thinking, and separating out the sound thinking from the erroneous thinking. As the philosopher Tho...
In order to separate good thinking from bad thinking, philosophy essentially runs on what philosophers call ‘arguments’, i.e. chains of reasoning that support certain conclusions. There are a whole host of ways in which arguments can be presented and structured. They can be informal, like persuading a friend to go to a certain restaurant, or a poli...
Compared to the grand instruments of modern science, the humble arguments of philosophers may not seem a very impressive toolkit. But, when you think about it, it is upon such deployments of reason that all human knowledge is built. The ability to formulate and respond to rational arguments is — arguably — among humanity’s most powerful intellectua...
While philosophical inquiry can be (and has been) applied to virtually any subject, one traditional picture organizes philosophy into four core branches. These are the branches of epistemology (the study of knowledge), metaphysics (the study of reality), value theory (the study of ethics and values), and logic(the study of correct reasoning). The p...
As we’ve seen, the concerns of philosophy are both deep and wide-ranging. There may be some areas that interest you, there may be others you find a little dry* (*cough, logic, cough). Either way, philosophers have been studying the difficult questions mentioned above for thousands of years. The ancient Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristo...
If you’re interested in learning more about philosophy, check out our follow-up piece, Why Is Philosophy Important Today, and How Can It Improve Your Life?, as well as our bite-size Life’s Big Questions course, which distills the great philosophers’ answers to some of life’s most difficult and enduring questions: Why does anything exist? Is percept...
Jul 23, 2020 · The idea of “philosophy as a way of life” has been gaining currency both among the general public and among professional philosophers. Among the public, the interest can be seen in the increasing popularity of events such as Stoic Week, and in a variety of bestselling books. 1 Among professional philosophers, it can be seen in the surge of new grants, book series, and course offerings ...
- Stephen R. Grimm, Caleb Cohoe
- 2021
Feb 11, 2023 · Philosophy in everyday life. Often, you feel sadness, pain, anger, confusion, or fear that can affect your daily life. Another viewpoint with which you can modify these emotions and possibly find a solution comes from the Stoics.
May 15, 2007 · So, if one’s life is meaningful, it might be so in virtue of being married to a person, who is important. Being finite, the spouse must obtain his or her importance from elsewhere, perhaps from the sort of work he or she does. This work also must obtain its meaning by being related to something else that is meaningful, and so on.
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His book Philosophy as a Way of Life, published in 1995, argued that in antiquity philosophy was primarily a guide to how to live. It was, like much modern philosophy, concerned with questions about knowledge, existence, language, and so on, but it approached these sorts of questions within a broader understanding of what philosophy is ultimately for.
