Definition: Philosophy

In the simplest terms, philosophy is the attempt to understand the world — but at a very high level, which is what tends to make it abstract. Philosophy is more concerned with seeing the forest than with knowing the details of individual trees (that's the job of the sciences). Yet it's also concerned with making sure that we've got our intellectual and ethical foundations well-laid. After all, badly-laid foundations won't do a good job of supporting anything that's laid upon them.

So the job of responsible philosophers is (among other things) to lay the best possible

foundations for our understanding of our world, to provide "the big picture" that's left out of more specific areas of knowledge, and to help us understand clearly what values should be most important to us. Philosophers are, by definition, committed to rationalism — which means they must scrupulously avoid superstition, supernaturalism, and all forms of illogic, especially self-contradiction. In short, they must believe anything they believe for very good reasons.

The attempt to get at the foundations of our understanding is known more

technically as "epistemology." Most of all, epistemologists want to know: when are we well-justified in having any given belief? Questions about evidence and logic are very important to the epistemologist.

Part of getting the "big picture" lies in understanding the nature of things — both the world and ourselves. The technical word for the discipline that attempts to classify and describe the nature of things is "metaphysics." Metaphysics is different from physics in being more general, but metaphysicians must nevertheless have a good understanding of physics, and all the

other sciences, too.

The other part of getting the "big picture" is understanding our place in the world. The technical word for the study of morals and the purpose of life is "ethics." It's the job of the philosopher of ethics to understand what makes our actions morally right or wrong, and to determine the most meaningful way to live.

While an understanding of philosophy requires some intellectual effort, it is not insuperably difficult. The best introductions to the discipline are described in the Philosophy Field Guide linked below.