Philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is very hard to define accurately, but one way to understand it is to look back at what various philosophers have attempted to accomplish. Philosophy can be considered a study of humans and the world by asking questions about life. These questions are created from philosophers’ critical thinking about knowledge, reality and morality, etc. Philosophy tries to answer these important questions by giving answers on   real life situations and trying to answer “why?”. These questions in Philosophy can be broken down into several groups/disciplines depending on where the question is directed.
To begin with there is Epistemology which can be considered the study of knowledge or the theory of knowledge. Epistemology is very important because all other philosophical disciplines depend on knowledge; therefore any philosophical inquiry has to address epistemological issues as well. Skeptics would say that we really have no knowledge at all, and then there are other philosophers known as rationalists and empiricist that try to determine the origin of knowledge. Empiricists believe that our source of knowledge comes from sensory experience and there is no alternative to experience. Then there are Rationalists that say experience is merely opinion, while knowledge is actually attainable through reason, unlike sensory experience. Overall epistemology is very important because it can relate to many other philosophical disciplines.
Then there is ethics, or moral Philosophy, and is the study of principles governing human action in terms of their goodness, badness, rightness and wrongness. Realism says that when it comes to standards that govern human behavior, moral truth exists independently from human culture, while Anti-realism says there is no moral truth and is man-made, meaning it depends on the culture or society. Another important issue closely related to ethics is political philosophy. Political philosophy is concerned with how we should...