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Jul 8, 2014 · So what is a budding philosopher to do? An informative series of posts by Helen De Cruz of New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science features interviews with seven philosophy Ph.D.s who have ...
- Rebecca J. Rosen
Rebecca J. Rosen is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where...
- Rebecca J. Rosen
- 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?
- Continue Learning
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...
The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze offered some practical points on what makes a person a philosopher by noting that the philosopher must create new concepts: “The philosopher is the concept’s friend; he is potentially of the concept. That is, philosophy is not a simple art of forming, inventing, or fabricating concepts, because concepts are not necessarily forms, discoveries, or products.
Philosophy is closely related to many other fields. It is sometimes understood as a metadiscipline that clarifies their nature and limits. It does this by critically examining their basic concepts, background assumptions, and methods. In this regard, it plays a key role in providing an interdisciplinary perspective. It bridges the gap between ...
Describe philosophy as a discipline that makes coherent sense of a whole. Summarize the broad and diverse origins of philosophy. It is difficult to define philosophy. In fact, to do so is itself a philosophical activity, since philosophers are attempting to gain the broadest and most fundamental conception of the world as it exists.
Philosophy might affect future career prospects in a number of ways: Some philosophy concentrators go on to graduate school to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy. Most of those become professors of philosophy, which means that their professional lives are devoted to research and teaching in philosophy.
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Oct 10, 2020 · Philosophers typically consider questions that are, in some sense, broader and/or more fundamental than other inquirers’ questions: [3] e.g., physicists ask what caused some event; philosophers ask whether causation even exists; historians study figures who fought for justice; philosophers ask what justice is or whether their causes were in fact just; economists study the allocation of ...