Philosophy

What Is Philosophy?

Philosophy — perhaps the oldest academic discipline — explores enduring fundamental questions about the world and our place in it: What is the ultimate nature of reality? What really exists, and what is mere appearance? What, if anything, can we genuinely know? How are our conscious minds related to our physical bodies? What is value, and which values should we adopt? What makes for a good or valuable life? Are we ever responsible for the actions we perform, or are we merely victims of our environment and our genetic inheritance? How should societies be organized? How should we understand the relationship between science and religion, or between reason and faith?

Such questions are not the inventions of philosophers, of course. Many of us ponder them as children. Yet later we come to ignore them — or simply accept answers to them unreflectively. Philosophers, though, strive to keep pondering, and to address these questions as thoroughly as possible through reasoned discussion and argument.

By engaging in this process, philosophers illuminate aspects of the world that people routinely take for granted. We are everywhere guided by unexamined assumptions about truth, knowledge, reality, goodness, beauty, freedom, and justice. Philosophy lays bare these assumptions and then analyzes and questions them. And so those who aspire to live reflective lives cannot help but be gripped by philosophical inquiry. For them, philosophy is essential.

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