Philosophy and Critical Thinking

What is Philosophy
• the study of the fundamental nature of
knowledge, reality, and existence, especially
when considered as an academic discipline.
• Philosophy is a way of thinking about the
world, the universe, and society. It works by
asking very basic questions about the nature
of human thought, the nature of the universe,
and the connections between them. The ideas
in philosophy are often general and abstract.
 What is philosophy used for?
• Philosophy uses the tools of logic and reason
to analyze the ways in which humans
experience the world. It teaches critical
thinking, close reading, clear writing, and
logical analysis; it uses these to understand
the language we use to describe the world,
and our place within it.
 What is the purpose of philosophy?
• The Purpose of Philosophy Class. It is not
the purpose of a Philosophy class to transmit
information or inculcate skills, however useful
that may be. It is to introduce students to the
life of the mind, with all the characterological
as well as intellectual changes that requires.
 What are the 4 branches of
philosophy?
• Logic is the attempt to codify the rules of rational
thought. Logicians explore the structure of
arguments that preserve truth or allow the
optimal extraction of knowledge from evidence.
More formally, logic is the study of the structure
of arguments. Logic is one of the primary tools
philosophers use in their inquiries; the precision
of logic helps philosophers to cope with the
subtlety of philosophical problems and the often
misleading nature of conversational language.
• Epistemology is the study of knowledge itself.
Epistemologists ask, for instance, what criteria
must be satisfied for something we believe to
count as something we know, and even what
it means for a proposition to be true. Two
epistemological questions I discuss elsewhere
on this site are the question of how we can
know the future will be like the past, and the
question of how we can be sure about
anything at all
• Metaphysics is the study of the nature of
things. Metaphysicians ask what kinds of
things exist, and what they are like. They
reason about such things as whether or not
people have free will, in what sense abstract
objects can be said to exist, how it is that
brains are able to generate minds,
and whether or not there is a god.
• Axiology is an umbrella term for different
studies that center upon the nature of
different types of value. These different
studies include aesthetics, which investigates
the nature of such things as beauty and
art; social philosophy and political philosophy;
and, most prominently, ethics, which
investigates both the nature of right and
wrong and the nature of good and evil.