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Maqasid al Falasifa ( Arabic: مقاصد الفلاسفة ), or The Aims of the Philosophers was written by Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ghazali. Influenced by Avicenna's works, he wrote this book presenting the basic theories of philosophy. [1] In this book, he explained in detail about what philosophy is and described basic ...
- What Does Philosophy Mean?
- How Is Philosophy done?
- How Can We Think Clearly About Thinking?
- So, Philosophy Just Rests on ‘Arguments’?
- The 4 CORE Branches of Philosophy
- Who Does Philosophy?
- Continue Learning
The word ‘philosophy’ literally means ‘love of wisdom’, and this etymology is apt, for as a subject philosophy generally refers to the study of deep, fundamental questions (like those we opened with) relating to core aspects of the human condition. These questions typically revolve around the nature of existence, knowledge, consciousness, ethics, s...
Considering such difficult, fuzzy subject matter, we might wonder how philosophers get anything done. How does philosophy make progress? How do philosophers decide what’s accurate and inaccurate? Well, it essentially comes down to thinking hard about thinking, and separating out the sound thinking from the erroneous thinking. As the philosopher Tho...
In order to separate good thinking from bad thinking, philosophy essentially runs on what philosophers call ‘arguments’, i.e. chains of reasoning that support certain conclusions. There are a whole host of ways in which arguments can be presented and structured. They can be informal, like persuading a friend to go to a certain restaurant, or a poli...
Compared to the grand instruments of modern science, the humble arguments of philosophers may not seem a very impressive toolkit. But, when you think about it, it is upon such deployments of reason that all human knowledge is built. The ability to formulate and respond to rational arguments is — arguably — among humanity’s most powerful intellectua...
While philosophical inquiry can be (and has been) applied to virtually any subject, one traditional picture organizes philosophy into four core branches. These are the branches of epistemology (the study of knowledge), metaphysics (the study of reality), value theory (the study of ethics and values), and logic(the study of correct reasoning). The p...
As we’ve seen, the concerns of philosophy are both deep and wide-ranging. There may be some areas that interest you, there may be others you find a little dry* (*cough, logic, cough). Either way, philosophers have been studying the difficult questions mentioned above for thousands of years. The ancient Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristo...
If you’re interested in learning more about philosophy, check out our follow-up piece, Why Is Philosophy Important Today, and How Can It Improve Your Life?, as well as our bite-size Life’s Big Questions course, which distills the great philosophers’ answers to some of life’s most difficult and enduring questions: Why does anything exist? Is percept...
May 15, 2007 · The Meaning of Life. Many major historical figures in philosophy have provided an answer to the question of what, if anything, makes life meaningful, although they typically have not put it in these terms (with such talk having arisen only in the past 250 years or so, on which see Landau 1997).
The first one was a summary of philosophical thought titled Maqāsid al-Falāsifa (Aims of the philosophers), an exposition that follows Avicenna's philosophical doctrine. In Maqāsid , al-Ghazali clearly stated that this book was intended as an introduction to Tahāfut , and he also stated that one must be well versed in the ideas of the ...
The historical origins of philosophical thinking and exploration vary around the globe. The word philosophy derives from ancient Greek, in which the philosopher is a lover or pursuer (philia) of wisdom (sophia). But the earliest Greek philosophers were not known as philosophers; they were simply known as sages. The sage tradition provides an ...
Philosophy is a way of thinking about certain subjects such as ethics, thought, existence, time, meaning and value. That 'way of thinking' involves 4 Rs: r esponsiveness, r eflection, r eason and r e-evaluation. The aim is to deepen understanding. The hope is that by doing philosophy we learn to think better, to act more wisely, and thereby ...
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What is the aim of Philosophy?
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What is philosophy based on?
Some philosophers engage in most of their theorizing using one particular method while others employ a wider range of methods based on which one fits the specific problem investigated best. Conceptual analysis is a common method in analytic philosophy. It aims to clarify the meaning of concepts by analyzing them into their component parts.
