Philosophy

• 1. Introduction

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  Philosophy began with a word that may have been coined by a man who measured the music in plucked strings. Some sources credit the pre-Socratic thinker Pythagoras with inventing the term, though no one is certain. It comes from two Ancient Greek words, philos and sophia, a pairing that braids affection together with wisdom. Socrates put the stakes plainly when he declared that the unexamined life is not worth living. Centuries later Bertrand Russell warned that a person with no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions that grew up without the consent of deliberate reason.

  The word entered English around 1175 CE, arriving through Old French and Anglo-Norman, carried in from the Latin philosophia. For most of its life it meant something enormous. It once swallowed physics, chemistry, and biology whole, all gathered under a banner called natural philosophy. So what happened that shrank it into the narrower thing studied in universities today? Why did Isaac Newton write a book with natural philosophy in its title that we now shelve under physics? And how can a single discipline reach from the question of why there is something rather than nothing all the way to whether an embryo is already a person? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. The Discipline That Reflects On Itself

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  Rational inquiry that aims to be systematic and that turns its critical eye back on its own methods. That self-scrutiny is what marks philosophy out from ordinary curiosity. It asks a person to think long and carefully about the provocative, vexing, and enduring problems central to the human condition, and it often refuses to hand back a tidy answer. Instead it helps someone examine their life, dispel confusion, and shed self-deceptive ideas that hide inside common sense.

  Precise definitions of philosophy are themselves a battlefield, studied in a field called metaphilosophy. Some thinkers argue that all its parts share a set of essential features. Others see only loose family resemblances, and a few dismiss the word as an empty blanket term. According to Soren Overgaard and his collaborators, many proposed definitions are revisionistic, meaning that if they were true, large stretches of what we currently call philosophy would lose the title entirely.

  Immanuel Kant tried to unite the whole enterprise around four questions: what can I know, what should I do, what may I hope, and what is the human being. Other definitions lean on method rather than topic, treating philosophy as pure reasoning, while still others define it by its subject as the attempt to answer the big questions. Each approach tends to run too wide and let in non-philosophical disciplines, or too narrow and shut out genuine subfields.

  W. V. O. Quine, a naturalist, saw philosophy as an empirical yet abstract science concerned with wide-ranging patterns rather than particular observations. That science-based view faces an awkward fact. Philosophy, over its long history, has not progressed the way the sciences have. One reply calls it an immature or provisional science, the midwife of the sciences, whose offspring stop being philosophy once they grow up. Against this stands a tradition older than universities, found in ancient Greece and Rome, that treated philosophy as a spiritual practice. The Stoics trained the mind as an exercise, aiming at eudaimonia and a flourishing life.

• 3. Four Great Traditions

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  Ancient Greece in the 6th century BCE gave Western philosophy its start, when the pre-Socratics tried to explain the cosmos as a whole through reason. The thinkers who followed, Socrates who lived from 469 to 399 BCE, Plato from 427 to 347 BCE, and Aristotle from 384 to 322 BCE, widened the questions to how people should act and what reality and mind actually are. Later came Epicureanism, Stoicism, Skepticism, and Neoplatonism. The medieval period opened in the 5th century CE and bent philosophy toward religious questions, using ancient ideas to elaborate Christian doctrine, until the Renaissance revived Platonism and the modern period asked how knowledge itself is made.

  Arabic-Persian philosophy arose in the early 9th century CE as a response to debates inside Islamic theology. Al-Kindi, who lived from 801 to 873 CE, is usually named its first philosopher, and he translated Aristotle and the Neoplatonists to argue that reason and faith are in harmony. Avicenna, from 980 to 1037 CE, built a comprehensive system spanning science, religion, and mysticism. Then Al-Ghazali, from 1058 to 1111 CE, struck back, attacking the claim that reason alone could grasp reality and God, and trying to fence philosophy in beside the Quran and mystical insight.

  The Vedas, written around 900 BCE, founded Indian philosophy by binding together the nature of reality, the means of knowledge, and the spiritual question of enlightenment. Gautama Siddhartha, who lived from 563 to 483 BCE, founded Buddhism by denying the permanent self and charting a path out of suffering. Mahavira, from 599 to 527 BCE, founded Jainism on non-violence and respect for all life. Later, Adi Shankara, around 700 to 750 CE, taught that everything is one and that a universe of distinct things is an illusion, a view Ramanuja, from 1017 to 1137 CE, softened by calling individual entities real parts of a single underlying unity.

  Chinese philosophy turned toward practical life, toward right social conduct, government, and self-cultivation, as rival schools rose in the 6th century BCE to calm political turbulence. Confucius, who lived from 551 to 479 BCE, taught moral virtues that lead to social harmony. Laozi, placed in the 6th century BCE, founded Daoism on living in harmony with the natural order, the Dao. Mohism developed an early altruistic consequentialism, while Legalism pressed for a strong state and strict laws. In the early 20th century, Chinese Marxism, with its focus on class struggle and communism, transformed the political landscape and stood beside a movement called New Confucianism.

• 4. Voices On The Margins

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  Shinto, the indigenous religion of Japan, fused with Confucianism and Buddhism after both entered the islands in the 6th and 7th centuries. Traditional Japanese philosophy favored active interaction with reality over detached examination. In the 20th century the Kyoto School married Eastern spirituality to Western philosophy, exploring concepts like absolute nothingness, called zettai-mu, place, called basho, and the self.

  Indigenous civilizations practiced Latin American philosophy before colonization, asking about the nature of reality and the role of humans, with echoes of indigenous North American thought and its theme of the interconnectedness of all things. Around 1550 the colonial period arrived, and religious philosophy in the form of scholasticism took over. After independence, the field turned to positivism, the philosophy of liberation, and questions of identity and culture.

  Ubuntu is one of the philosophical concepts carried by early African philosophy, which was conducted and transmitted orally and centered on community, morality, and ancestral ideas. Systematic African philosophy emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. It took up ethnophilosophy, negritude, pan-Africanism, postcolonialism, African epistemology, and the critique of Eurocentrism, turning oral wisdom into written argument.

• 5. The Architecture Of Knowing

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  Knowing that Princess Diana died in 1997 is the kind of fact epistemology studies first, the declarative knowledge of facts. The branch also reaches into practical knowledge, like knowing how to ride a bicycle, and knowledge by acquaintance, like knowing a celebrity personally. It asks what knowledge is, how it arises, what its limits are, and what truth, belief, justification, and rationality really amount to.

  The analysis of knowledge tries to break declarative knowledge into parts, and one influential theory says it has exactly three: a belief that is both justified and true. That neat formula ran into trouble known as the Gettier problem, which is why some philosophers add a fourth ingredient like the absence of luck, swap justification for the manifestation of cognitive virtues, or deny that knowledge can be taken apart at all.

  Perception, introspection, memory, inference, and testimony are the usual sources people draw knowledge from. Empiricists insist all knowledge rests on some form of experience, while rationalists hold that some knowledge, such as innate knowledge, never passes through the senses. Lurking underneath is the regress problem. If every belief needs a reason, and every reason needs its own reason, the chain threatens to run forever or curl into a circle. Foundationalists stop the regress with sources that justify without needing justification themselves, while coherentists say a belief is justified when it fits with a person's other beliefs. Behind all of this waits philosophical skepticism, which doubts that humans can reach the absolute certainty knowledge seems to demand.

• 6. How To Live And How To Argue

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  Right conduct is the territory of ethics, which also weighs the moral worth of character traits and institutions and asks what gives life meaning. It splits into three layers. Meta-ethics asks abstract questions about the nature and sources of morality and whether ethical claims can be true in an absolute sense. Normative ethics builds general theories for telling right from wrong. Applied ethics carries those theories into specific situations, like the workplace or medical treatment.

  Consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics are the three influential schools within normative ethics. Consequentialists judge an action by its results, and utilitarianism, one version, says actions should raise overall happiness while minimizing suffering. Deontologists judge by duty instead, by whether an action honors obligations like not lying or not killing, regardless of outcome. Virtue theorists look to the agent, asking what an ideally virtuous person, full of generosity and honesty, would do.

  Modus ponens shows how logic, the study of correct reasoning, separates good arguments from bad ones. Its form runs: p; if p then q; therefore q. A homely example proves the point, that today is Sunday, that if today is Sunday then there is no work, and therefore there is no work. Logic divides into formal logic, which uses precise symbolic languages, and informal logic, which judges arguments by content and context.

  Deductively valid arguments guarantee their conclusion whenever their premises are true, but not all reasoning is so airtight. Inductive reasoning generalizes from many cases, concluding that all ravens are black after seeing many black ones. Abductive reasoning leaps to the best explanation, the way a doctor reads a disease from its symptoms. When reasoning goes wrong, the errors are called fallacies, sorted into formal and informal kinds depending on whether the fault lies in the argument's shape or in its content.

• 7. The Furniture Of Reality

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  Why is there something rather than nothing? That question sits at the heart of metaphysics, the study of the most general features of reality, of objects and properties, wholes and parts, space and time, events, and causation. Metaphysicians also ask of what reality ultimately consists and whether humans are free. The field divides into general metaphysics, which examines being as such and the features all entities share, and specific metaphysics, which studies the different kinds of being.

  Ontology, sometimes treated as identical to general metaphysics, investigates being, becoming, and reality, sorting the categories of existence and asking what is fundamental. Philosophical cosmology, a neighboring subfield, asks whether the universe has a beginning and an end and whether something else created it. A further dispute concerns whether reality is only physical, made of matter and energy, or whether mental entities like souls and abstract entities like numbers exist apart from physical things.

  The color red can sit in many places at once, and that single fact divides the world into universals and particulars. Universals can exist in different locations at the same time; particulars, like individual persons or specific objects, cannot. Identity raises its own puzzle, how much a thing can change and still remain itself. One answer separates essential features from accidental ones, so that an entity survives losing the accidental but perishes if it loses the essential. And if the past fully determines the present, philosophers ask what becomes of free will.

• 8. Where Philosophy Touches The World

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  Frege and Russell pushed the philosophy of language to prominence in the early 20th century, within the movement called analytic philosophy. That field studies meaning, reference, and truth, asking how words attach to things and how language shapes thought. It splits into camps, one emphasizing the formal truth conditions of sentences and another studying when it is suitable to use a sentence, the second tied to speech act theory. Nearby sits the philosophy of mind, where the mind-body problem asks how mind and matter relate. Materialism makes matter fundamental, idealism makes mind fundamental, dualism keeps them distinct, and functionalism defines mental states by their causal roles. The hard problem of consciousness asks how a physical brain produces subjective experience at all.

  Bioethics shows philosophy making real decisions in medicine, weighing whether an embryo is already a person and when abortion is morally permissible. A related question asks how humans should treat other animals, whether it is acceptable to use them for food or research. In business, philosophy supplies ethical frameworks and the issue of corporate social responsibility. In law, epistemology asks what counts as evidence and how much is needed to find a person guilty, and journalism inherits the related worry of ensuring truth and objectivity.

  Enlightenment philosophy laid the foundation for constitutional democracy and helped shape the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Marxist philosophy and its account of communism fed the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Communist Revolution. In India, Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence shaped the independence movement. Philosophy also reached the feminist movement through Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, and Judith Butler, who reshaped the understanding of gender and how it differs from biological sex.

  Wittgenstein offered one striking image of what philosophy is for, treating it as a kind of therapy that dispels the misunderstandings ordinary language breeds. Charles Sanders Peirce gave another, the pragmatic maxim, which holds that a person's idea of an object is nothing more than the sum of practical consequences they tie to it. Phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl chose yet another path, suspending judgments about the external world through a technique called bracketing, or epoche, to get back to the things themselves. Many philosophy graduates carry these tools into other fields entirely, and some academics argue philosophy needs no such use at all, since it is undertaken for its own sake.