Philosophy

Philosophy is generally the study of problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, justification, truth, justice, right and wrong, beauty, validity, mind, and language. Undoubtedly, many other disciplines study such things. However, philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these issues by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned argument, rather than experiments (for example).

The etymology of the term "philosophy" is ancient Greek meaning love of wisdom. According to Immanuel Kant, "Ancient Greek philosophy was divided into three sciences: physics, ethics, and logic". Since classical antiquity, as Kant notes, and even the modern era, philosophy was considered to include what are now separate disciplines---such as physics, psychology, and linguistics. Since the rise of such disciplines, however, the main fields of philosophy have remained to be logic, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. Most of these fields deal with more normative or evaluative issues---issues about what we ought to do or what is good. Thus, the central questions of philosophy are often framed in such ways as: "What should one believe?" or "What is the right thing to do?" And, while distinct disciplines are nonetheless disciplines in their own right, many of the problems studied overlap with philosophy. For example, linguistics studies language, including semantics (or meaning). However, philosophers and linguists both study meaning. Their approaches to that issue are simply different, yet both aim at acquiring knowledge about the meanings of words and other linguistic phenomena.