What Is Philosophy - Key Terms & People

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Philosophy

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Love of wisdom; the systematic, critical examination of the way in which we judge, evaluate, and act, with the aim of making ourselves wiser and more self-reflective.

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Irony

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A kind of speech or communication that assumes a double audience. The speaker appears to be addressing his ironic statement to a superficial audience, but he is, in reality, directing it at a second, or real, audience.

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Double Irony

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A statement whose “real” audience is not the apparently real audience (which actually misses the speaker’s true point as well), but rather some third audience altogether, like a reader or some other outside observer.

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Socratic Method:

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A process of questions and answers by which we systematically reach deeper and deeper insights into the principles of truth and goodness.

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Justice:

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The fundamental principles of right and wrong. Aristotle defines it as the art of ‘treating equals equally and unequals unequally.’

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Cosmology:

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The study of the order of the world; a branch of astronomy that investigates the organization and structure of the entire physical universe, including its origins.

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Metaphysics:

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A subfield of philosophy which treats first principles. Typical metaphysical questions involve the existence of a deity, the nature of causality, and the mind/body problem.

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Atomism:

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A cosmological theory, which claims everything in the universe, including the human soul, is composed of minute units of matter called atoms.

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Taxonomy:

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The study of the general principles of scientific classification.

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Stoicism:

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From the ‘Stoa’ or painted porch from which the school’s founder, Zeno of Citium, expounded his doctrines. The philosophical school which claims that the natural world exhibits a rational order that can be explained solely by reason. Stoics are today best known for their ethical views, but their contribution to Logic, (particularly Syllogistic Logic), was also very significant.

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Logos:

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The power of reason.

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Natural Law:

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The concept that the universe functions in accordance with a rational idea of the proper form and order of its organization.

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Empiricism:

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The theory that all human knowledge comes from the evidence of our five senses, and therefore we can never know more, or know with greater certainty, than our senses will allow.

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Rationalism:

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The theory that at least some human knowledge comes from reason, unaided by the senses, and therefore that we can know about things that the senses do not reveal to us and can know with greater certainty than the senses will allow.

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Epistemology:

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The study of the mind’s capacity for knowing. Literally, ‘knowledge’ (episteme) + ‘theory’ (logos): major concerns of epistemology are the sources, criteria, and limits of knowledge.

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Rationality:

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The mind’s ability to present reasons, evidence, and arguments in support of our beliefs; the ability to deduce conclusions from premises.

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Universality:

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The concept that a statement, if true, applies always and everywhere.

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Objectivity:

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Being true to the way the world really is, not merely reflecting the inner nature of the individual subject . A functional definition would address the clarity of the task at hand and some criterion for assessing veridicality. The supremacy of objectivity as an epistemological virtue has been challenged from several quarters in recent years. Some Feminists deride the notion of the “objective” thinker or agent as surreptitiously gendered, and as early as the Nineteenth Century Kierkegaard proclaimed, “Truth is Subjectivity.”

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Anaximander (611 B.C.E. to 547 B.C.E.):

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Greek philosopher; the successor and perhaps pupil of Thales. He claimed that the first principle (Arche) was not a particular substance like water or air but the infinite or indefinite (in Greek, the Apeiron, or the ‘boundless’.) He is credited with producing the first map, and with many imaginative scientific speculations, for example that the Earth is unsupported and at the center of the universe. A translation of his surviving fragment runs as follows: “Whence things have their origin, thence also their destruction happens, as is the order of things, giving justice and reparation to one another for their crimes.”

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Anaximenes (~500 B.C.E.?):

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Greek philosopher, born in Miletus. He claimed that the first principle (Arche) and basic form of matter was air, which could be transformed into other substances by a process of condensation and rarefaction. This notion of successive change may have influenced Heraclitus, and is explicitly criticized by Parmenides.

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Aristotle (384 B.C.E. to 322 B.C.E.):

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Greek philosopher, scientist, and physician, born in Stagira, Macedonia. In 367 he went to Athens, where he was associated with Plato's Academy until Plato's death in 347 B.C.E. In 342 B.C.E. he was invited by Philip of Macedon to educate his son, Alexander. After Alexander’s death, Athenian resentment resulted in a charge of impiety being brought against Aristotle; unlike Socrates, whose resolve is shown in Plato’s Crito, Aristotle fled to Chalcis rather than, as he said, allow ‘Athens to sin twice against Philosophy.’ Aristotle's writings represented a large and varied output over virtually every field of knowledge: logic, metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric, poetry, biology, zoology, physics, and psychology. The bulk of the work that survives actually consists of unpublished material in the form of lecture.

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Beattie, James (1735 to 1803):

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Poet and essayist, born in Laurencekirk, Aberdeenshire, NE Scotland, UK. After working as a schoolmaster in Fordoun he became a master at Aberdeen Grammar School, and in 1760 professor of moral philosophy at Aberdeen. He is primarily remembered for his long poem, The Minstrel. A colleague of Reid’s and an advocate of common sense, he combated the skepticism of Berkeley and Hume and was rewarded with a royal pension by George III.

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Berkeley, George (1685 to 1753):

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Anglican bishop and philosopher, born in Kilkenny, Ireland. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, where he remained until 1713. In his most important books he developed his celebrated claim that “esse est percipi”-“to be is to be perceived”- that the contents of the material world are "ideas" that only exist when they are perceived by a mind. His remaining work was divided between questions of religious reflection and social reform, an example of which was his (unrealized) dream of founding a seminary for colonists and Native Americans.

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Descartes, René (1596 to 1650):

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Rationalist philosopher and mathematician, born in France. He developed the major features of his philosophy in his most famous work, Meditations on First Philosophy. In this work he argued that God must exist and cannot be a deceiver; therefore, his beliefs based on ordinary sense experience are correct. He also argued that mind and body are distinct substances, believing that this dualism made possible human freedom and immortality. In other work, he virtually founded analytic geometry, and made major contributions to optics.

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Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt (1868 to 1963):

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Editor, historian, sociologist, political activist, author. A Massachusetts native, Du Bois was shocked and profoundly affected by the racial segregation in the South, which he experienced firsthand while attending Fisk University from 1885-88. After receiving a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895, he studied black life in the Philadelphia ghetto and wrote The Philadelphia Negro (1899). Du Bois served as a professor of economics, history, and economics at Atlanta University from 1898 1910, during which time he published his collection of essays The Soul of Black Folk (1903), which called for the African American middle class to mobilize against bigoted racial policies.

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Freud, Sigmund (1856 to 1939):

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Developed psychoanalytic therapy technique, born in Freiburg, Moravia (now Príbor, Czech Republic). He studied medicine at Vienna, then specialized in neurology, and later in psychopathology. Finding hypnosis inadequate, he used the method of "free association," allowing the patient to express thoughts in a state of relaxed consciousness, and interpreting the data of childhood and dream recollections. He became convinced, despite his own puritan sensibilities, of the fact of infantile sexuality, a theory which isolated him from the medical profession. In 1900 he published his major work, Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), arguing that dreams are disguised manifestations of repressed sexual wishes (in contrast with the widely held modern view that dreams are simply a biological manifestation of the random firing of brain neurons during a particular state of consciousness). In 1902, he was appointed to a professorship in Vienna. Out of this grew the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society (1908) and the International Psychoanalytic Association (1910).

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Hegel, Georg (1770 to 1831):

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Idealist philosopher, born in Germany. He studied theology at Tübingen, and in 1801 edited The Critical Journal of Philosophy in which he outlined his system with its emphasis on reason rather than Romantic intuitionism, which he attacked in his first major work, The Phenomenology of the Mind. His approach, influenced by Kant, rejects the reality of finite and separate objects and minds in space and time, and establishes an underlying, enveloping unity, the Absolute. The quest for greater unity and truth is achieved by the dialectic, positing something (thesis), denying it (antithesis), and combining the two in a synthesis which contains a greater portion of truth in its complexity. (Note: this terminology, although helpful in explicating Hegel’s Dialectic, is seldom mentioned explicitly in Hegel’s own work; its prevalence may, in fact, stem from the work of Fichte.)

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Hume, David (1711 to 1776):

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Philosopher and historian, born in Scotland, UK. He studied at Edinburgh, and took up law. In his masterpiece, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), he consolidated and extended the empiricist tradition. His views became widely known only when he wrote two volumes of Essays Moral and Political (1741-2). He wrote the posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion in the 1750s. His atheism kept him from receiving professorships at Edinburgh and Glasgow, and he became a tutor, secretary, and keeper of the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh.

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Jesus Christ (? to 29 C.E.):

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The central figure of the Christian faith, whose nature as "Son of God" and whose redemptive work are traditionally considered fundamental beliefs for Christians. The title Christ (Greek) reflects the belief that Jesus was the Messiah (the anointed one) of Jewish tradition. His ministry stressed love of neighbor over the dominant focus on laws and traditions held by the Jews of his time. After his execution at the hands of the Romans, his followers spread his message throughout the known world and turned what had been a Jewish sect into a separate religion.

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Kant, Immanuel (1724 to 1804):

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Philosopher born in Germany. He became a professor of logic and metaphysics in 1770. His main work, now a philosophical classic, is Critique of Pure Reason in which he provided a response to the empiricism of Hume. Kant followed this over time with two other “Critiques,” one of which (Critique of Practical Reason) deals with moral theory and another (“Critique of Judgment”) centering on aesthetic questions. A significant later work, worthy of mention, is his “Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.” For those interested in a somewhat more approachable picture of Kant’s ethical theory than is offered in the Second Critique, “Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals” is recommended.

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Leibniz, Gottfried (1646 to 1716):

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Philosopher and mathematician, born in Germany. In 1700 he persuaded Frederick I of Prussia to found the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, of which he became the first president. A man of remarkable breadth of knowledge, he made original contributions to optics, mechanics, statistics, logic, and probability theory. He wrote on history, law, and political theory, and his philosophy was the foundation of Rationalism. He was involved in a controversy with Isaac Newton over whether he or Newton was the inventor of integral and differential calculus; the Royal Society formally declared for Newton in 1711, but the matter was never really resolved. His “Monadology” is rightfully considered a masterpiece of Metaphysics.

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Locke, John (1632 to 1704):

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Philosopher, born in England. He studied at Oxford, and in 1667 joined the household of Lord Ashley, later first Earl of Shaftesbury, as his personal physician and adviser in scientific and political matters. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1668. His major philosophical work, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), accepted the possibility of rational demonstration of moral principles and the existence of God, but its denial of innate ideas was important in starting the tradition of British Empiricism.

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Lucretius (50 B.C.E. to ?):

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Roman poet and philosopher. His major work is the poem "On the Nature of Things," in which he tried to popularize the philosophical theories of Democritus and Epicurus on the origin of the universe, rejecting and condemning religious belief as the one great source of human wickedness and misery. Without Philosophy, Lucretius declared, “all life is a struggle in the dark.”

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Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121 to 180):

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One of the most respected emperors in Roman history. When he was 17, he was adopted by Antoninus Pius, who had succeeded Hadrian and whose daughter Faustina was selected for his wife. He was made consul in 140, and he discharged his public duties with great conscientiousness, at the same time devoting himself to the study of law and philosophy, especially Stoicism. Peaceful by temperament, his reign witnessed constant wars, and permanent peace was never secured. He was idealized as the model of the perfect emperor.

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Plato (428 B.C.E. to 347 B.C.E.):

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Greek philosopher, probably born in Athens of a wealthy family. Little is known of his early life, but he was a devoted follower of Socrates. He traveled widely, and then he founded his Academy at Athens, where Aristotle was his most famous pupil. He remained there for the rest of his life. His many dialogues are usually divided into three periods. The early dialogues have Socrates as the principal character engaged in ironic and inconclusive interrogations about the definition of different moral virtues. In the middle dialogues, he develops his own positive doctrines, such as the theory of knowledge as recollection, the immortality of the soul, and, most importantly, the theory of forms (or "ideas") which contrasts the temporal, material world of "particulars" (objects merely of perception, opinion, and belief) with the timeless, unchanging world of universals or forms (the true objects of knowledge). The Republic also describes Plato's celebrated political utopia, ruled by philosopher kings; a more dystopic version is to be found in his “Laws.”

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Russell, Bertrand (1872 to 1970):

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Philosopher and mathematician, born in Wales, UK. He studied at Cambridge, where he became a fellow of Trinity College in 1895. Concerned to support the objectivity of mathematics, he pointed out a contradiction in Frege's system, published his own Principles of Mathematics (1903), and collaborated with Whitehead in Principia Mathematica (1910-13). After 1949 he became a champion of nuclear disarmament. One of the most important influences on modern analytic philosophy, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.

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Socrates (469 B.C.E. to 399 B.C.E.):

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Greek philosopher, born in Athens. Little is known of his early life. According to Plato, he devoted his last 30 years to convincing the Athenians that their opinions about moral matters could not bear the weight of critical examination. His technique, the Socratic Method, was to ask for definitions of such morally significant concepts as piety and justice, and to elicit contradictions from the responses, thus spurring deeper enquiry into the concepts. He was convicted of charges of impiety and corruption of youth by zealous defenders of a restored democracy in Athens, sentenced, and executed. Aside from Plato’s dialogues, his life inspired two works by Xenophon and a scabrous rendering in Aristophanes’ “The Clouds.”

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Thales (? to 555 B.C.E.):

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Greek natural philosopher, regarded as the first philosopher, born in Miletus. His journeys took him to Egypt and Babylon, where he acquired land surveying and astronomical techniques, and apparently predicted the solar eclipse in 585 BC. None of his writings are extant, but Aristotle credits him with the doctrine that water is the original substance (Arche) from which all things are derived. Diogenes Laertius tells a fanciful tale of his meteorological prowess being used to amass a fortune in the olive oil business—not, as Thales says there, because wealth is desirable inherently, but to show that a wise man could be rich, if he so chose.

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Whitehead, Alfred North (1861 to 1947):

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Mathematician and Idealist philosopher, born in England, UK. He studied at Cambridge, where he was senior lecturer in mathematics until 1910. He then taught at London (1910-14), becoming professor of applied mathematics at Imperial College (1914-24), and was then professor of philosophy at Harvard (1924-37). He collaborated with his one-time pupil, Bertrand Russell, in writing the Principia Mathematica (1910-13).