wunder beta🤔 Intro to Philosophy
The big questions: knowledge, reality, right, and wrong.
What you’ll learn
- Define philosophy and identify Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the major branches.Philosophy means the love of wisdom and uses reason to tackle life's deepest questions. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle shaped Western thought, and the field divides into branches such as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and logic.
- Explain the core questions of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and logic.Metaphysics asks what is real, epistemology asks what we can know, ethics asks how we should live, and logic studies valid reasoning. Rival theories in each branch offer competing but reasoned answers.
- Recognize philosophy's global history and the value of philosophical thinking.Philosophy flourished across China, India, the Islamic world, and modern Europe, evolving through movements like the Enlightenment and existentialism. Studying it builds clear, honest, questioning habits of mind useful everywhere.
Questions this course answers
What does the word 'philosophy' literally mean?
Philosophy comes from Greek roots meaning 'love of wisdom.'
How do we mainly know Socrates' ideas, since he wrote nothing?
Socrates wrote nothing; his ideas survive largely through the dialogues written by his student Plato.
Which branch of philosophy studies what is real and what exists?
Metaphysics investigates the fundamental nature of reality and existence.
A classic definition says knowledge is what?
Knowledge has traditionally been defined as justified true belief, a definition later challenged by Gettier.
Empiricists like Locke and Hume argued that knowledge comes mainly from what?
Empiricists hold that knowledge originates in sensory experience, in contrast to rationalists.
Utilitarianism judges an action by whether it does what?
Utilitarianism, from Bentham and Mill, evaluates actions by how much overall happiness they produce.
Grounded in trusted sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu)
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://iep.utm.edu)
- Bertrand Russell, 'A History of Western Philosophy' (1945)
- Britannica, 'Part of speech and philosophy entries' (https://www.britannica.com)
- Nigel Warburton, 'Philosophy: The Basics' (Routledge, 2012)
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