What Is Philosophy?
Philosophy, at least according to the origin of the word in classical Greek, is the love of wisdom—philosophers are lovers of wisdom. The first philosophers of the Western tradition lived on the shores of the Mediterranean in the sixth century BCE (that is, more than 2,500 years ago);thinkers such as Thales, Xenophanes, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Protagoras tried systematically to answer questions about the ultimate nature of the universe, the standards of knowledge, the objectivity of moral claims, and the existence and nature of God. Questions like these are still at the core of the discipline today.
So what is philosophy? It can be characterized either as a particular sort of method, or in terms of its subject matter, or as a kind of intellectual attitude.
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Material from Chapter One, First Philosophy. Ed. Andrew Bailey with Robert Martin.
