Introduction

Philosophy is a varied subject and the question "What is philosophy?" can be answered in a number of different ways. This Guide Entry aims to look at the question in two different ways. Firstly, it will look the different areas of philosophy. Secondly, it will look at what it is that unites philosophy to be considered as one subject rather than many.

Metaphysics

The first area to look at is metaphysics
¹
. Metaphysics' name is derived from the Ancient Greek, "meta", which means "after" or "behind". Thus metaphysics is concerned with what comes after physics. Whereas physics is concerned with the way things behave, metaphysics is concerned with whether there is anything at all, if there is anything beyond the physical, and how we arrive at the knowledge of it, if indeed anything there is. The question of whether or not there is a God also is treated as a metaphysical question.

Metaphysics has, throughout its history, been considered both a worthwhile and a worthless history. As it often seems to make claims that cannot be reduced to numbers but to assumptions, inferences and verbal proofs- and sometimes seems to claim to know things that critics would say are not possible to know. It has been considered by some famous philosophers to be worthless. David Hume (1711- 1776) was one of those philosophers, his advice on books containing nothing but metaphysics being to burn them.

Why such harsh criticism of metaphysics? Well, due to the failure of rationalism (about which more later) to overcome the sceptical challenges posed to it, many things as are doubted in a rational system (the reliability of sensory experience, et cetera) must be assumed. Metaphysics is, by its very definition, of that which is beyond the physical, and yet our senses our grounded in the physical. One must conclude then, not that metaphysical assertions are necessarily false, but that one simply cannot know.

Epistemology

Epistemology is concerned with the question of what knowledge itself actually is. This includes, first of all, defining what the word "knowledge" means. For a long time the definition of knowledge has been the tripartite definition, which states that for one to know something, if must fulfill three conditions:

1. 
   It must be true (Truth Condition)
   
2. 
   It must be justified (Evidence Condition)
   
3. 
   It must be believed (Belief Condition)
   

Another two conditions have been added, as the original three do not to cover everything:

1. 
   The Conditional Theory, that if it wasn't true, one wouldn't believe it.
   
2. 
   "Tracking the Truth"; that is, if in changed circumstances, it was still true, then one would still believe it.
   

Once a working definition for knowledge has been ascertained, one then goes on to see what one can know. There is overlap with metaphysics here: metaphysics will ask whether the spoon exists; epistemology will ask how one can know there is a spoon if it does indeed exist. Metaphysics is concerned with what is. Epistemology is concerned with how we can know it. For example:

Metaphysics: X exists because...

Epistemology: I can know X exists because...

Epistemology is not only concerned with such overlaps; it is also about whether one can know anything at all and if so, how? It may seem that this is repetition, but this is to qualify that epistemology is what we can know and what we base that knowledge on. It is also about the limits of our knowledge; whether it is possible to discover anything or whether there are some things that will never be known.

Moral and Political Philosophy

These are possibly the most practical areas of philosophy, in that they have a more direct bearing on the way we live our lives from day to day, the choices we make in our lives and, on a larger scale, what it is right to do with regard international affairs- was it right for the USA to get involved in Vietnam, for example. Clearly these are very important areas- otherwise policymaking and the justice system simply fall apart. After all, who is to say what is the correct sentence for a criminal if one is unable to discern how wrong what he has done is, or even if it is wrong at all?

Political philosophy also has applications in whether democracy is the best way to govern people. Proofs have been devised to say that anarchy is in fact more beneficial to the people, which some would say have yet to have effective counter- arguments made against them.

There are other ways of splitting up these areas, but it is like dividing a cake into either three thirds or four quarters: there are more pieces, but they still constitute only one cake.

The Parable of The Cave

To continue the analogy from the previous paragraph, now that I know what the pieces of the cake are, I should find out what it is as a whole. This is best demonstrated in the parabel of the cave, as told by Socrates.

The story goes that there is a line of prisoners, chained together looking at a cave wall. They are chained so that they cannot turn their heads around to look behind them. Behind them is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a path. So the only thing the prisoners see and know is the shadows of reality on the cave wall. They assume, therefore, that the shadows are reality.

Then, one day, one of the prisoners is released. He goes up, out of the cave and into the sunlight. He sees colour and three dimensional images for the first time, and decides that he must go down back into the cave and tell all the other prisoner that what they have taken to be reality is false and what the world is really like. His eyes take a while to adjust to the gloom of the cave, and then require re- adjustment when he reaches the fire. This coupled with what he is saying- that reality is not what the prisoners' senses are telling them- make him look like a mad fool. The unreleased prisoners deduct from what they hear and see of the released man that going up out of the cave makes one mad, so they ignore him and return to watching the wall.

The point of the story is that people are like prisoners; they are used to believing to be true what their senses tell them to be true. When one of us is released from our chains and we try to see and explain that the world is not really like that, people tend to react irately or with a lack of sincerity.

Thus philosophy is trying to get at the truth of things. This tends to be done using logic and reason and, perhaps most importanty: doubt, to come to a proof. Of course, this proof is open to doubt itself- but this doubt is very valuable in refining the proof. Philosophy may seem a useless activity but when those who doubt its usefulness are asked "how can you prove that there's a spoon in front of you?" find that they cannot, they unwittingly draw themselves into what it is possible to know. Sometimes even this is not enough: believing your senses is a hard habit to break.

Two Types of Argument

A philosophical argument is not an argument in the sense of whether a blue shirt looks better than a black one. Instead it is a set of premises and conclusions that result from those premises. Philosophical arguments fall into two categories: deductive and inductive.

Deductive Arguments

A deductive argument is one where the premises can not lead to anything other than one conclusion. An example of a deductive argument could be:

Premise 1: All human beings are mortal.

Premise 2: All students are human beings.

Conclusion: All students are mortal.

For the conclusion of a deductive argument to be true, both the premises must also be true. An important distinction must be made here between "sound" and "valid". A sound argument is one in which both the premises are true, and the conclusion is true also. A valid argument is one in which the premises support the conclusion, but the one or more of the premsises are not true. An example of a deductive argument that is valid but not sound due to this could be:

Premise 1:All human beings are lazy.

Premise 2: All students are human beings.

Conclusion: All students are lazy.

Though the conclusion of the argument may be true anyway, the argument is not sound because not every human being is lazy.

Inductive Arguments

An inductive argument is a mass generalisation from one or few incidents. For example:

Premise 1: My stapler is blue

Conclusion: All staplers are blue

Though it may seem to be full of error, it was the preferred method of working of David Hume (1711- 1784) who said that it was impossible to know the full circumstances of anything, and therefore that inductive reasoning was the only appropriate sort of reasoning.

An inductive argument's weakness is this openness to other options. Thus an inductive argument can show strong, average, or weak support for the conclusion.

For all its percieved weakness, inductive method is actually the method used by science. Consider the following example:

Premise: This metal, and many others, expands when heated.

Conclusion: All metals expand when heated.

Perhaps one cannot be said to know that metals expand when heated; rather that, based on past experience, one has reason to believe that they will.

On Arguments

It is worth noting that an argument does not have to be true for it to persuade. All it has to do is persuade. If the person that you are arguing against does not see the flaw in your argument, it will be taken as true- though this will be damaging when corrected, in the long term. Techniques for doing this include building up a false picture of one's opponent's argument and attacking that (attacking a straw man), attacking one's opponent rather than his or her position (de hominem) and circularity, where the conclusion is assumed as true and used to prove itself. These methods lead to sloppy thinking and are not to be encouraged.

A Division in Philosophy

Philosophers since Plato at least have been divided into two main schools of thought: that of rationalism, and that of empiricism.

Rationalism

Rationalsim is a school of thought which takes reason to be the foundation of knowledge. Due to the (perceived by rationalists, at least) perceived failure of any empirical school of knowledge to prove the reliability of the senses, rationalists deduce all that they can without sensory input.

Empiricism

Empiricism is a school of thought which takes experience to be the principal source of knowledge.