What is philosophy and why should we care about this? Some people are averse to learn this subject but don’t understand the value of this. The word philosophy derives from Greek. The word is combination of two words; philo which means love and sophy it means knowledge, wisdom. If we combine the words which literally means that love of wisdom. [1]
Philosophy is one of the foundation of all knowledge. It forces us to think critically and logically without any kind of bias. Most of use are bounded by our circumstances without noticing. Many of our believes are shaped by the society which we belongs to. But the nuances is that believing what the society is inherently bad or that can’t be true. Which can be or can’t be.
There are four main brunches of philosophy which are epistemology, ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Epistemology deals with what is knowledge and how to gain it. Ethics studies the moral goodness and wrongness of an act. Logic studies how to distinguish good arguments from the bad ones. And finally metaphysics try to explain the reality what is it, is there anything beyond this observable universe or not and so forth.
Before the modern age the term philosophy also used to describe the sciences. Natural philosophy aka science was a major branch of philosophy. [2] This brach of philosophy included a wide range of fields such as biology, chemistry, physics and so on. One example is Issac Newton’s book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica which was a physics book but he named it Philosophiæ. [3]
Hoad, T. F. (1993). The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-283098-8. ↩︎
Cotterell, Brian (2017). Physics and Culture. World Scientific. ISBN 978-1-78634-378-9. Retrieved 25 August 2023. ↩︎
Regenbogen, Arnim (2010). “Philosophiebegriffe”. In Sandkühler, Hans Jörg (ed.). Enzyklopädie Philosophie (in German). Meiner. Archived from the original on 20 March 2022. Retrieved 15 February 2022. ↩︎