As a young man and a student, Kant lived a life of poverty and deprivation. He often went hungry, but preserved his health by "breathing only through my nose in the winter and keeping the pneumonia winds out of my chest by refusing to enter into conversation with anyone." Barely 5 feet tall, he was to become one of the giants of philosophy.
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Reading the works of Scottish philosopher and skeptic David Hume awakened him, he said, from his "dogmatic slumber." His best known book is The Critique of Pure Reason, sometimes described as a nearly unreadable masterpiece of philosophy. Kant himself described it as "dry, obscure, contrary to all ordinary ideas, and on top of that prolix." (Prolix means verbose.) He was right. He once sent the completed manuscript to a friend who was himself an eminent scholar. The man read some of the book but returned it unfinished, explaining, "If I go on to the end, I am afraid I shall go mad."
Journal of the History of Philosophy (JHP) is an international journal that publishes articles, notes, discussions, and reviews about the history of Western philosophy, broadly conceived. JHP takes its mandate from a motion passed by the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in December 1957 approving "the establishment of a journal devoted to the history of philosophy." Each issue includes refereed articles on topics ranging from ancient and medieval to nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy as well as book reviews. The Journal publishes material in English, German, and French.
It is important to understand how philosophy and education are interrelated. In order to become the most effective teacher you can be, you must understand your own beliefs, while at the same time empathizing with others. In this chapter we will examine the study of philosophy, the major branches of philosophy, and the major philosophical schools of thought in education. You will have a chance to examine how these schools of thought can help you define your personal educational philosophy. Developing your own educational philosophy is a key part of your journey to becoming a teacher. In this article, we will discuss the 5 things that educators should know about the philosophy of education.
What are the major branches of philosophy? The four main branches of philosophy are metaphysics, epistemology, axiology, and logic. Metaphysics considers questions about the physical universe and the nature of ultimate reality. Epistemology examines how people come to learn what they know. Axiology is the study of fundamental principles or values. Logic pursues the organization of the reasoning process. Logic can be divided into two main components: deductive reasoning, which takes general principles and relates them to a specific case; and inductive reasoning, which builds up an argument based on specific examples.
What are the major schools of thought in philosophy? Idealism can be divided into three categories: classical, religious, and modern. Classical idealism, the philosophy of the Greeks Socrates and Plato, searches for an absolute truth. Religious idealism tries to reconcile God and humanity. Modern idealism, stemming from the ideas of Descartes, links perception and existence.
Historically, philosophy encompassed all bodies of knowledge and a practitioner was known as a philosopher.[16] "Natural philosophy," which began as a discipline in ancient India and Ancient Greece, encompasses astronomy, medicine, and physics.[17][18] For example, Isaac Newton's 1687 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy later became classified as a book of physics. In the 19th century, the growth of modern research universities led academic philosophy and other disciplines to professionalize and specialize.[19][20] Since then, various areas of investigation that were traditionally part of philosophy have become separate academic disciplines, and namely the social sciences such as psychology, sociology, linguistics, and economics.
Today, major subfields of academic philosophy include metaphysics, which is concerned with the fundamental nature of existence and reality; epistemology, which studies the nature of knowledge and belief; ethics, which is concerned with moral value; and logic, which studies the rules of inference that allow one to derive conclusions from true premises.[21][22] Other notable subfields include philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, political philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind.
There is wide agreement that philosophy (from the ancient Greek φίλος, phÃlos: "love"; and σοφία, sophÃa: "wisdom")[23] is characterized by various general features: it is a form of rational inquiry, it aims to be systematic, and it tends to critically reflect on its own methods and presuppositions.[24][25][26] But approaches that go beyond such vague characterizations to give a more interesting or profound definition are usually controversial.[25][26] Often, they are only accepted by theorists belonging to a certain philosophical movement and are revisionistic in that many presumed parts of philosophy would not deserve the title "philosophy" if they were true.[27][28] Before the modern age, the term was used in a very wide sense, which included the individual sciences, like physics or mathematics, as its sub-disciplines, but the contemporary usage is more narrow.[26][29][30]
Some approaches argue that there is a set of essential features shared by all parts of philosophy while others see only weaker family resemblances or contend that it is merely an empty blanket term.[31][28][32] Some definitions characterize philosophy in relation to its method, like pure reasoning. Others focus more on its topic, for example, as the study of the biggest patterns of the world as a whole or as the attempt to answer the big questions.[28][33][34] Both approaches have the problem that they are usually either too wide, by including non-philosophical disciplines, or too narrow, by excluding some philosophical sub-disciplines.[28] Many definitions of philosophy emphasize its intimate relation to science.[26] In this sense, philosophy is sometimes understood as a proper science in its own right. Some naturalist approaches, for example, see philosophy as an empirical yet very abstract science that is concerned with very wide-ranging empirical patterns instead of particular observations.[28][35] Some phenomenologists, on the other hand, characterize philosophy as the science of essences.[27][36][37] Science-based definitions usually face the problem of explaining why philosophy in its long history has not made the type of progress as seen in other sciences.[28][38][39] This problem is avoided by seeing philosophy as an immature or provisional science whose subdisciplines cease to be philosophy once they have fully developed.[26][31][36] In this sense, philosophy is the midwife of the sciences.[26]
Other definitions focus more on the contrast between science and philosophy. A common theme among many such definitions is that philosophy is concerned with meaning, understanding, or the clarification of language.[33][28] According to one view, philosophy is conceptual analysis, which involves finding the necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of concepts.[34][28][40] Another defines philosophy as a linguistic therapy that aims at dispelling misunderstandings to which humans are susceptible due to the confusing structure of natural language.[27][26][41] One more approach holds that the main task of philosophy is to articulate the pre-ontological understanding of the world, which acts as a condition of possibility of experience.[28][42][43]
Many other definitions of philosophy do not clearly fall into any of the aforementioned categories. An early approach already found in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy is that philosophy is the spiritual practice of developing one's reasoning ability.[44][45] This practice is an expression of the philosopher's love of wisdom and has the aim of improving one's well-being by leading a reflective life.[46] A closely related approach identifies the development and articulation of worldviews as the principal task of philosophy, i.e. to express how things on the grand scale hang together and which practical stance we should take towards them.[28][24][47] Another definition characterizes philosophy as thinking about thinking in order to emphasize its reflective nature.[28][34]
In one general sense, philosophy is associated with wisdom, intellectual culture, and a search for knowledge. In this sense, all cultures and literate societies ask philosophical questions, such as "how are we to live" and "what is the nature of reality". A broad and impartial conception of philosophy, then, finds a reasoned inquiry into such matters as reality, morality, and life in all world civilizations.[48]
While our knowledge of the ancient era begins with Thales in the 6th century BCE, little is known about the philosophers who came before Socrates (commonly known as the pre-Socratics). The ancient era was dominated by Greek philosophical schools. Most notable among the schools influenced by Socrates' teachings were Plato, who founded the Platonic Academy, and his student Aristotle, who founded the Peripatetic school.[50] Other ancient philosophical traditions influenced by Socrates included Cynicism, Cyrenaicism, Stoicism, and Academic Skepticism. Two other traditions were influenced by Socrates' contemporary, Democritus: Pyrrhonism and Epicureanism. Important topics covered by the Greeks included metaphysics (with competing theories such as atomism and monism), cosmology, the nature of the well-lived life (eudaimonia), the possibility of knowledge, and the nature of reason (logos). With the rise of the Roman empire, Greek philosophy was increasingly discussed in Latin by Romans such as Cicero and Seneca (see Roman philosophy).[51] 2ff7e9595c