What is philosophy?
Philosophy is the study to try to understand life and answers to topics
like religion, knowledge, existence and really philosophy is really asking the
question “why.” This paper will be talking about what is philosophy, the nature
of philosophy, how it is different from other modes of thought, the subject
matter of philosophy, the rules of philosophy, criteria of philosophy, how it is
related and also how it is different from other sciences, and also why
philosophy is referred to as the mother
sciences.
The nature of philosophy begins with wonder said Aristotle (384-322BCE.)
Philosophy means “love of wisdom” (philiosophia) which was coined by Pythagoras
one of the very first philosophers known to man. Philosophy talks about how we
think and live in the world. In order to be a teacher or student of philosophy
you have to be able to think about and be concerned with all creation with in
the universe and convey existence. The rational discourse is a big tool in
philosophy which puts you on one of two sides either a foundationlism
(fundamentalism, dogmatism, absolutism) or constructivism (relativism) these are
two extremes of philosophy and the goal is to be in the rational discourse which
is in the middle of the two extremes. There are lots of different studies that
go into philosophy one being cosmology which is the study of cosmos, and there
are also lots of other philosophers that have been a large affect on the beliefs
of philosophy a couple are Thales who was said to be the father of western
philosophy and Urstoff who believed in the staff or origion, what all comes
from.
Philosophy is different from other modes due to the way you think. The
dominate mode to our thinking before Thales was referred to as myth which are
stories that are elaborated truth barriers. Being a student of philosophy makes
you see and think about things in a totally different way than you ever have in
your life. It makes you start questioning everything that exists, everything you
have been told, and everything you think. What if you were told nothing exist
and everything is formed by your consciousness? That everything you see is
actually just your consciousness telling you that the table you see has four
legs, it’s brown and has a certain pattern on it. Technically it’s not even
there. I’m assuming your next question would be that if everyone’s consciousness
paints the picture for you then why does everyone see the same thing? And that
would be because of language. Language is a very important part in philosophy
and is the “tool” of philosophy. Language is the system of signs or symbols
utilized to communicate information “to be” are to communicate. That is how
everyone ends up seeing the same thing, if I tell you I see a table with four
legs, it’s brown and has a certain design on it then your consciousness will
then automatically put that picture in your mind and that is what you will see.
The fundamental rules of philosophy are consistency which is the
avoidance of logical contradiction, coherency- avoid and a hypothesis, adequacy-
flexibility of interpretive scheme, applicability- relevance of interpretive
scheme, communicability-
transmittable within the community of discourse. Language is the “tool” of
philosophy, language is a system of symbols utilized to communicate information
“to be” is to communicate.
Philosophy is referred to as the mother science due to two key people
knows as Homer who lived in the 9th century B.C and Hesiod who lived
in the 8th century B.C. It is still at question if Homer ever lived,
Homer wrote “the Iliad and the
Odyssey.” Hesiod is less known by people who is known for writing the text
“The Theogony.”
Homer and Hesiod tried to make sense of the world and explain in there
works how it all woked. They tried to explain in mythic stories the meaning of
existence and how to make since of the world and everything that surrounds us.
These myths are not false; they
are explaining truths in the stories just kind of between the lines truths.
Science and philosophy were actually one in the same, it used to be said that to
be a rational thinker you were a scientist and also a philosopher there was not
a distinction between biology, chemistry and so to philosophy. The
earlier philosophers are discussed as the pre-Socratic philosophers. Pre-
Socratic meaning they did there works before Socrates came into the picture.
Thales the first pre-Socratic thinker wanted to explain why we experience
what we experience, why we see what we see. Thales then started his quest to figure
out what the Germans referred to as “Urstoff” which means what all things come
from. He comes to the conclusion
that all things must come from water which was one of the four elements that
made up the world at that early time the other three being air, earth and fire.
He thought it was water because in our everyday life you could see water in a
gas, liquid, or solid and everything is either a gas, liquid, or solid therefor
everything must be made up of water. Thales also noted that everything needed
water to survive and life was such a strong thing that water had to be the
principle of existence. Pre-Socratics had other ideas of the principle of
existence some saying fire, others saying air, and even some claiming it isn’t
one of the elements, it is an undiscovered material that made up existence.
Numbers and atoms were also other ideas coming from pre-Socratic thinkers. The
pre-Socratic thinkers were said to be cosmologists because it was said they were
attempting to tell a story about the universe.
There was a man named Protagoras who lived in 480-410B.C that stated a
new revolution called the Sophist Revolution. The Sophist noticed that the
pre-Socratic could not come up with an answer that described what all came from.
The Sophist claimed that you must look inward in order to figure out what all
stuff came from instead of looking outward as the pre-Socratic thinkers did.
Their reasoning for the revolution is that what we see is a direct relation of
what we feel inwardly. For example if an individual likes green things then his
attention would be drawn more too green things then red. The question the
presented was what it meant to be human; there answer was we were human because
we are language users. Language and rhetoric were the two things that the
Sophist focused on. This changed the philosophical beliefs from a material to a
linguistic explanation. The problem that the Sophist run into is called
relativism, which explains that peoples inward thoughts and feels are different
therefor peoples experience would have to be different so not everyone would see
the same thing. The problem with relativism is that there would be no true moral
values. A person could just wake up one day and decide that murder is okay and
murder is a cool thing and then that would be his moral value and would see
nothing wrong with it. This is what starts the search for universalism which is
the search for universal morals and beliefs that no one is subjective to. A very
important person to the idea of relativism was a man by Socrates who lived in
470-399 B.C. Socrates agrees that the pre-Socratics were looking in the wrong
direction and they indeed did need to be looking inward instead of outward. He
said one must know them self before they have any chance of understanding the
nature of things beyond themselves. What Socrates really wants to do is develop
a form of Sophism without relativism. He believed that we needed to spend more
time thinking about the form of the language instead of the content of the
language. This starts Socrates quest to search for formal explanations. Socrates
talked about how there are things in our life that we cannot touch, feel, see or
taste such as numbers so in which that makes things such as numbers formal
beliefs. It’s like how we believe in math, we have been told our whole lives
that one plus one equals two, so when someone asks us what one plus one is, we
believe that it is two because it is rational but we will never truly understand
its two until we understand the language in which the question is being asked .
This belief from Socrates leads to the forming of new sciences in our
world.
Philosophy can be a very difficult thing to wrap your head around, and it
can also be something you really don’t want to wrap your head around because it
does challenge your beliefs and your morals. It questions everything you know
and everything that you have learned and makes you look so much deeper into life
itself. It has remarkably changed my outlook on why everything is and helped me
further understand existence.