Fields of Philosophy: The Philosophy of Science, Mind, Religion, Law and Art

The fields of philosophy are the areas where philosophy’s core questions (what is real, how we know, what is good, what follows from what, what is beautiful) are aimed at one part of life: science, law, religion, language, technology, death, art. Philosophy of science, political philosophy and philosophy of religion are the best known. There are more than thirty.

On Coordinates of Thought these fields make up the sixth root of The Coordinates, the Philosophy of X Family: 32 fields and 9 sub-questions, 41 cards in all, taken from The Coordinates of Thought. Each card opens with one plain question (Is an unjust law still a law? Are numbers discovered or invented? Can something be bad for you if you are not there for it?) and sets the rival answers side by side, with the philosophers who gave them, from Confucius and Ibn Khaldun to Popper and Arendt.

How the fields of philosophy are built: the core questions, aimed at one part of life

Philosophy has five core roots: metaphysics (what is there?), epistemology (how do we know?), ethics (what is good, and what should we do?), logic (what follows from what?) and aesthetics (what is beauty, and what is art for?). A field such as the philosophy of law is not a sixth subject standing beside them. It is the questions above, aimed at one part of life.

The cards show the wiring. Philosophy of science depends on epistemology’s questions about the sources of knowledge and the structure of justification. Philosophy of mathematics depends on the metaphysics of abstract objects and on how reason knows anything at all. Political philosophy depends on normative ethics; philosophy of religion depends on natural theology and on revelation as a claimed source of knowledge. Learn the core roots and every field becomes easier to enter. Study a field and you keep meeting the core roots in a new setting.

Two familiar fields sit elsewhere on the map because they are treated as core. 1.3 Philosophy of Mind belongs to metaphysics, and 5.2 Philosophy of Art to aesthetics. Practical moral questions, such as 3.3.1 Bioethics and Medical Ethics or 3.3.4 Ethics of Technology and AI, belong to applied ethics. The list is also open: philosophy of food, of sport or of information appear whenever philosophers turn the same tools on a new subject.

Political philosophy, law and society

Political philosophy

6.4 Political Philosophy asks: when is political power legitimate, and what may it rightly do? The answers run from anarchism (no state authority is legitimate) through libertarianism, classical and social liberalism, republicanism (freedom as non-domination), communitarianism, socialism and conservatism, to Confucian government by cultivated virtue and the Chinese Legalist reliance on impersonal standards. The card is marked contested △. Its three sub-cards ask 6.4.1 who should get what, and why △, 6.4.2 whether you are free when nobody stops you, or when you could actually do it, and 6.4.3 who holds final authority.

Philosophy of law

6.2 Philosophy of Law turns on one question: is an unjust law still a law? Natural law theory says an unjust law is defective as law. Legal positivism (Bentham, Hart) separates a law’s validity from its merit. Legal realism looks at what officials actually do; Dworkin’s interpretivism counts the principles that best justify the practice as part of the law. Usul al-fiqh, the Islamic discipline of legal method associated with al-Shafi’i, derives law from revealed sources by disciplined interpretation.

Philosophy of education

6.3 Philosophy of Education asks whether education is filling someone up or drawing something out. Rival answers: transmission of knowledge, liberal education for its own sake, Dewey’s growth through experience, Freire’s critical pedagogy, vocational preparation, Confucian cultivation through ritual and relationship, and the Islamic pairing of tarbiya (nurture of character) with ta’lim (instruction).

• 6.5 Philosophy of Economics: are economic models describing people, or a convenient fiction about them?
• 6.6 Philosophy of History: is history going anywhere? Providential, progressive, cyclical (Ibn Khaldun), dialectical (Hegel, Marx), or one thing after another.
• 6.7 Social Ontology: what makes groups, institutions and other social facts real, and how do they depend on individuals?

Conversations on these fields gather in Society & Politics.

Philosophy of science, mathematics and the sciences

Philosophy of science

6.8 Philosophy of Science asks: what makes a claim scientific? Verification, falsification (Popper), inductive support, a defined method, the practice of the scientific community, or a family resemblance of typical features: the card gives each answer with its known problem. Ibn al-Haytham, al-Biruni, Bacon and Duhem stand alongside Popper, Quine and Feyerabend. Three sub-cards follow: 6.8.1 Scientific Explanation, 6.8.2 Scientific Realism (do electrons exist, or do they just work?) and 6.8.3 Scientific Revolutions, where Kuhn’s paradigms meet Lakatos’s research programmes.

Philosophy of mathematics

6.9 Philosophy of Mathematics asks: are numbers discovered or invented? Platonism says numbers are abstract objects existing independently of us; logicism (Frege) reduces mathematics to logic; formalism (Hilbert) treats it as rule-governed symbol manipulation; intuitionism (Brouwer) as mental construction. Structuralists, fictionalists and empiricists add three more answers, and all of them must explain why mathematics applies to the world so well.

• 6.11 Philosophy of Physics: what is quantum theory telling us about the world? Copenhagen, many-worlds, pilot wave and others agree on the mathematics and not on its meaning.
• 6.12 Philosophy of Biology: is there purpose in living things?
• 6.13 Philosophy of Medicine: what makes something a disease rather than a difference?
• 6.14 Philosophy of Psychology: can a science study something only one person can observe?
• 6.15 Philosophy of Social Science: can there be laws of human behaviour?

Conversations on these fields gather in Science & Technology.

Philosophy of language, technology and artificial intelligence

Philosophy of language

6.10 Philosophy of Language asks: how do noises come to be about things? A word’s meaning may be what it stands for, the idea behind it, the conditions under which a sentence would be true, its use in a practice (Wittgenstein), what the speaker intends (Grice) or its role in inference. The Buddhist apoha theory of Dignāga gives a different answer: a term applies by excluding what it does not apply to. Sub-cards cover 6.10.1 Reference and 6.10.2 Speech Acts: how does saying “I promise” make a promise?

Philosophy of technology

6.16 Philosophy of Technology asks: do we shape our tools, or do they shape us? Instrumentalists call technology a neutral means. Substantivists (Heidegger, Ellul) answer that it reshapes our ends; mediation theory (Ihde) says it alters perception and action without determining them; critical theory holds that design encodes interests. The worry is old: the Zhuangzi already asks what using machines does to the person who uses them.

Philosophy of artificial intelligence

6.17 Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence △ asks what a machine would have to do to count as thinking. Strong AI says the right program would have a mind; weak AI that machines model intelligence without having any; functionalism that causal organisation is what matters; Searle’s biological naturalism that thought needs the causal powers of brains; Turing’s behavioural test that indistinguishable behaviour is enough. The question depends on the philosophy of mind, and the ethical questions about AI sit on a separate card in ethics.

• 6.18 Philosophy of Information: is information something in the world, or something we bring to it?
• 6.24 Philosophy of Action: what is the difference between your arm rising and your raising it?

Philosophy of religion

6.1 Philosophy of Religion asks: what kind of claim is a religious claim? Its topics include whether omnipotence, omniscience and goodness are jointly coherent; whether God’s foreknowledge fixes our choices; the problem of evil; how finite words could apply to an infinite subject; what follows from lasting disagreement between religions; miracles; and whether religious ultimacy needs a personal God at all. Epicurus, al-Ash’ari, Ibn Sina, Maimonides, Ibn Arabi, Aquinas and Kierkegaard all appear, with Mackie, Rowe and Plantinga from recent analytic philosophy.

The sub-card 6.1.1 Religious Experience asks: if someone tells you they have met God, what have you learned? Answers range from genuine perception to naturalistic explanation to the Sufi view that such experience is not evidence but a transformation of the knower. Arguments for and against God’s existence live on 1.8 Natural Theology △. Discussion gathers in Religion & the Sacred.

Philosophy of death, love and the meaning of life

Philosophy of death

6.20 Philosophy of Death asks: can something be bad for you if you are not there for it? Epicurus and Lucretius say death is nothing to us. The deprivation account replies that death is bad because it takes goods you would otherwise have had. Others hold that survival changes the question, or that an endless life would be worse. The Buddha, al-Ghazali and Heidegger offer further ways of facing mortality.

The meaning of life

The card 6.21 Meaning in Life asks: does a life need a point, and where would it come from? Meaning may be given by God or a cosmic order, found in engaging with things of real value, made by whatever you care about, or (Susan Wolf’s hybrid) found in caring about what is worth caring for. Nihilism answers that there is none; Camus’s absurdism agrees, then recommends persistence rather than despair. Qoheleth, the voice of Ecclesiastes, asked the question long before any of them.

• 6.19 Philosophy of Love and Friendship: do you love someone for their qualities, or for being them?
• 6.22 Philosophy of Work: is work a cost to be minimised or a good in itself?
• 6.23 Philosophy of Emotion: can an emotion be wrong?
• 6.25 Philosophy of Sport and Play: why does it matter whether the ball crossed a line we drew?
• 6.26 Philosophy of Food: can you be wrong about what tastes good?
• 6.27 Philosophy of Humour: why is anything funny?

These questions belong to Meaning, Art & the Good Life.

Identity, culture and film: gender, race, disability and media

These fields ask what kind of category something is, which is metaphysics aimed at social life. Two of them are marked contested, and each card keeps the rival accounts side by side.

• 6.28 Philosophy of Disability: is the difficulty in the body or in the world it meets? Medical, social and interactional models, among others.
• 6.29 Philosophy of Gender △: what kind of thing is a gender category? Biological, social-position, norm-based, identity-based, cluster, eliminativist and pluralist accounts.
• 6.30 Philosophy of Race △: if race is not biological, what is it? Du Bois, Fanon and Appiah are among the voices.
• 6.31 Philosophy of Culture: can you understand a culture from outside it? Relativism, universalism, hermeneutics, cosmopolitanism.
• 6.32 Philosophy of Film and Media: how do images argue? Bazin’s realism, Eisenstein’s montage, McLuhan’s medium theory, and Cavell’s view that films can do philosophy.

All the fields of philosophy on one tree

Here is the whole root: every field and sub-question, linked to its card, with the contested ones marked △. For the other five roots, see the branches of philosophy or the full map of 131 cards.

Philosophers, books and live conversations across the fields

These are the thinkers named most often on the field cards, drawn from many traditions. Ibn Khaldun alone appears on cards for history, economics, social science, work and culture.

For reading, start with the beginner-friendly titles from the Book corner.

And here are the latest conversations in these fields. If your question is not there yet, ask it.

Where do you stand?

Every question here has serious answers on more than one side. Pick a card, read the rival answers, then say which you find strongest and why. Members ask, reply and take sides; reading is free for everyone.

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