WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?

• Philosophia came from two Greek words:

 Philo which means “to love”
 Sophia which means “wisdom”
• Philosophy originally meant “love of wisdom.”
• Philosophy is also defined as the science that by natural light of reason studies the first causes or
highest principles of all things.
 Science
 It is an organized body of knowledge.
 It is systematic.
 It follows certain steps or employs certain procedures.
 Natural Light of Reason
 It uses a philosopher’s natural capacity to think or human reason or the so-called
unaided reason.
 Study of All Things
 It makes philosophy distinct from other sciences because it is not one
dimensional or partial.
 A philosopher does not limit himself to a particular object of inquiry.
 Philosophy is multidimensional or holistic.
Meaning of Holism
 It is a way or attitude of viewing life or situation in a more encompassing way. It
is not a one-sided view, but looks at wider perspectives or beliefs. This includes
our views about life, culture and what is right or wrong.
 First Cause or Highest Principle
 Principle of Identity – whatever is, is; whatever is not is not. Everything is its
own being, and not being is not being.
 Principle of Non-Contradiction – it is impossible for a thing to be and not to be at
the same time.
 Principle of Excluded Middle – a thing is either is or is not; between being and
not-being, there is no middle ground possible.
 Principle of Sufficient Reason – nothing exists without sufficient reason for its
being and existence.
• Early Greek philosophers studied aspects of the natural and human world that later became
separate sciences—astronomy, physics, psychology, and sociology.
 • Basic problems like the nature of the universe, the standard of justice, the validity of knowledge,
the correct application of reason, and the criteria of beauty have been the domain of philosophy
from its beginnings to the present.
• These basic problems are the subject matter of the branches of philosophy.

BRANCHES OF PHILOSOPHY
Metaphysics
• It is an extension of a fundamental and necessary drive in every human being to know what is
real.
• A metaphysician’s task is to explain that part of our experience which we call unreal in terms of
what we call real.
• We try to make things comprehensible by simplifying or reducing the mass of things we call
appearance to a relatively fewer number of things we call reality.
• Thales
 He claims that everything we experience is water (“reality”) and everything else is
“appearance.”
 We try to explain everything else (appearance) in terms of water (reality).
• Idealist and Materialist
 Their theories are based on unobservable entities: mind and matter.
 They explain the observable in terms of the unobservable.
• Plato
 Nothing we experience in the physical world with our five senses is real.
 Reality is unchanging, eternal, immaterial, and can be detected only by the intellect.
 Plato calls these realities as ideas of forms
Ethics
 It explores the nature of moral virtue and evaluates human actions.
 It is a study of the nature of moral judgments.
 Philosophical ethics attempts to provide an account of our fundamental ethical ideas.
 It insists that obedience to moral law be given a rational foundation

• Socrates
• To be happy is to live a virtuous life.
 • Virtue is an awakening of the seeds of good deeds that lay dormant in the mind and heart
of a person which can be achieved through self-knowledge.
• True knowledge = Wisdom = Virtue
• Courage as virtue is also knowledge
 William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
• An African-American who wanted equal rights for the blacks.
• His philosophy uses the same process as Hegel’s dialectic (Thesis > Antithesis >
Synthesis).
Epistemology
• It deals with nature, sources, limitations, and validity of knowledge.
• It explains: (1) how we know what we claim to know; (2) how we can find out what we wish to
know; and (3) how we can differentiate truth from falsehood.
• It addresses varied problems: the reliability, extent, and kinds of knowledge; truth; language; and
science and scientific knowledge.

Sources of knowledge
• Induction
• gives importance to particular things seen, heard, and touched
• forms general ideas through the examination of particular facts
• Empiricist – advocates of induction method
• Empiricism is the view that knowledge can be attained only through sense
experience.
• Deduction
• gives importance to general law from which particular facts are understood or
judged
• Rationalist – advocates of deduction method
• For a rationalist, real knowledge is based on the logic, the laws, and the methods
that reason develops.
• Pragmatism – the meaning and truth of an idea are tested by its practical consequences.
Logic
• Reasoning is the concern of the logician.
• It comes from the Greek word logike, coined by Zeno, the Stoic (c.340–265BC), which means a
treatise on matters pertaining to the human thought.
 • It does not provide us knowledge of the world directly and does not contribute directly to the
content of our thoughts.
• It is not interested in what we know regarding certain subjects but in the truth or the validity of
our arguments regarding such objects.
Aristotle
• First philosopher to devise a logical method
• Truth means the agreement of knowledge with reality.
• Logical reasoning makes us certain that our conclusions are true.
Zeno of Citium
• One of the successors of Aristotle and founder of Stoicism
Other influential authors of logic
• Cicero, Porphyry, and Boethius
• Philoponus and Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes

Aesthetics
• It is the science of the beautiful in its various manifestations – including the sublime, comic,
tragic, pathetic, and ugly.
• It is important because of the following:
 It vitalizes our knowledge. It makes our knowledge of the world alive and useful.
 It helps us to live more deeply and richly. A work of art helps us to rise from purely
physical existence into the realm of intellect and the spirit.
 It brings us in touch with our culture. The answers of great minds in the past to the great
problems of human life are part of our culture.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
 A German philosopher who argues that our tastes and judgments regarding beauty work
in connection with one’s own personal experience and culture.
 Our culture consists of the values and beliefs of our time and our society.