Learn philosophy · Guide
What Is Philosophy? Meaning, Questions and Why It Matters
A clear answer to what philosophy is: where the word comes from, the questions it asks, where it began, and how it differs from science and religion.
On this page
- The meaning of the word philosophy
- What is philosophy about? A set of questions
- A definition of philosophy: a discipline of justification
- What do philosophers do?
- Where and when did philosophy begin?
- Philosophy vs science
- Philosophy vs religion
- What is philosophy for, and why study it?
- How to start learning philosophy
What is philosophy? Put simply, it is the reasoned attempt to answer questions that observation alone cannot settle: what is real, what we can know, how we should live, what makes an argument good, what beauty is, and what the basic ideas of other subjects mean. Its method is argument: giving reasons, testing them against objections and weighing rival answers.
That is the short answer. The rest of this page fills it in: where the word comes from, the questions philosophy actually asks, what makes a question philosophical rather than scientific, where philosophy began, and how to start thinking about it yourself.
The meaning of the word philosophy
The word comes from ancient Greek: philo, “loving”, and sophia, “wisdom”. Philosophy is, literally, the love of wisdom. Later ancient writers told a story in which Pythagoras declined to call himself wise and called himself a lover of wisdom instead. Whether or not it happened, the story captures the idea: a philosopher pursues understanding rather than claiming to possess it.
Other traditions named the activity differently, and the names are revealing. In Sanskrit the classical schools of Indian thought are called darśanas, “views” or “ways of seeing”. Arabic took over the Greek word as falsafa. The words now used for philosophy in Chinese and Japanese are nineteenth-century coinages made to translate the European term, although Chinese thinkers had been arguing about the questions it covers for well over two thousand years.
A working definition of philosophy therefore has two parts: a subject (questions about reality, knowledge, value, reasoning and meaning) and a method (careful, open argument). Most one-line definitions stress one or the other. You need both.
What is philosophy about? A set of questions
The clearest way to see what philosophy is, is to look at the questions it asks. The Coordinates, the map at the centre of this site, sets out 131 of them, one for each branch and sub-branch of philosophy, grouped under six roots. Each root has a core question, and every card beneath it narrows that question into something you can actually argue about.
- IMetaphysicsWhat exists, and what is it like?24 questions
- IIEpistemologyWhat can be known, and how?18 questions
- IIIEthics and AxiologyWhat is good, and what should I do?21 questions
- IVLogicWhat follows validly from what?16 questions
- VAestheticsWhat is beauty, and why does art move us?11 questions
- VIThe Philosophy of XThe questions above, aimed at one part of life.41 questions
One example from each root shows the range:
- Metaphysics: Why isn’t it all dark inside? Why physical processes in a brain are accompanied by experience at all. The card is marked △ contested, because philosophers disagree even about whether the problem is real.
- Epistemology: How do you know you are not being deceived about everything? The sceptic’s challenge, met in different ways by Pyrrho, Nagarjuna, Al-Ghazali, Descartes and G. E. Moore.
- Ethics and Axiology: If everyone approved of torturing children, would it still be wrong? Whether moral facts hold independently of what anyone thinks or feels about them.
- Logic: If you believe one contradiction, must you believe everything? In classical logic a single contradiction implies every statement; paraconsistent logics are designed so that it does not.
- Aesthetics: Why is the sadness of a sad song enjoyable? What happens in us when a work moves us.
- The Philosophy of X: Is an unjust law still a law? The same tools turned on one part of life, here the law and its relation to morality.
None of these is a quiz question with an answer at the back of the book. Each has several serious answers, defended by careful people across centuries and cultures. Learning philosophy largely means learning what those answers are, why people hold them, and what each one costs.
A definition of philosophy: a discipline of justification
If philosophy were defined only by its topics, it would be hard to say why “Does time pass?” belongs to it while “How old is the universe?” does not. The Coordinates of Thought, the book the 131 cards come from, offers a sharper test. Philosophy, it argues, is “not a subject matter but a discipline of justification, applied to questions that resist other methods.” And a question belongs to philosophy “when no observation settles it — not because the answer is unknowable, but because the disagreement is about what the observations mean.”
Free will is the classic case. Suppose neuroscience could trace every step from stimulus to decision. A hard determinist would say this confirms that you could not have done otherwise. A compatibilist would say it changes nothing about whether you acted freely, because freedom never required an uncaused choice, only acting from your own reasons without compulsion. A libertarian would agree that, if this were the whole story, there would be no free will, and would deny that it is the whole story. A hard incompatibilist would reply that an undetermined choice would be no more free than a determined one. The facts matter, but they do not end the argument. The disagreement is about what the facts mean for freedom and responsibility.
The card is marked △ contested. In the 2020 PhilPapers Survey, a majority of the philosophers who answered the free-will question accepted or leaned towards compatibilism, yet compatibilism still faces serious unresolved objections and the other positions keep able defenders. A majority view is not a settled one. That is typical of philosophy, and it is why this site sets the rival answers out side by side instead of announcing a winner.
What do philosophers do?
Philosophers do not run experiments, but their work has recognisable methods.
- They draw distinctions: knowing versus believing, a valid argument versus a sound one, your arm rising versus your raising it.
- They build and test arguments. An argument sets out premises and claims a conclusion follows. Logic studies when it really does.
- They look for counterexamples. In 1963 Edmund Gettier published two short cases in which someone has a justified, true belief that is plainly not knowledge, and with them unsettled a definition many had taken for granted. Indian philosophers such as Dharmottara and Sriharsa are often credited with similar cases centuries earlier. See the Gettier problem.
- They use thought experiments. If your brain’s two hemispheres were transplanted into two bodies, which one would be you? Cases like this test theories of personal identity where ordinary life gives no clean verdict.
- They map positions. Much progress in philosophy consists in learning exactly what each answer commits you to, and what it would take to give it up.
Philosophers also work alongside other fields: on hospital ethics committees, in debates about artificial intelligence, in law, and in the foundations of physics and mathematics. Wherever the hard part of a question is what the evidence means, philosophy is usually already at work.
Where and when did philosophy begin?
On the view taken here, philosophy did not begin in one place. Between roughly 800 and 200 BCE, a span the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, sustained and argued reflection on reality, knowledge and conduct appears independently in at least three regions.
- Greece. From the sixth century BCE, thinkers in the Greek cities of Ionia and southern Italy, among them Anaximander, Heraclitus and Parmenides, asked what the world is fundamentally made of and whether change is real. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle followed in Athens.
- India. The Upanishads record debates about the self and the nature of reality, with Yājñavalkya among the earliest named voices. The Buddha, Jain teachers and materialists such as Ajita Kesakambali argued against them and against one another.
- China. Confucius, Mozi, the Daoist texts associated with Laozi and Zhuangzi, and later Mencius and Xunzi argued about human nature, virtue and good government.
The story did not stop there. Philosophy flourished in the Islamic world (Al-Kindi, Ibn Sina, Al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd), in Jewish thought (Saadia Gaon, Maimonides), in medieval Christian Europe (Anselm, Aquinas), in Japan (Dogen), in Africa (Zera Yacob, Anton Wilhelm Amo, H. Odera Oruka) and in the modern European, analytic and continental traditions. This site treats all of them as part of one conversation. Browse them by tradition:
- Analytic 784
- Modern European 383
- Islamic 282
- Greek & Roman 267
- Indian 257
- Chinese 181
- Buddhist 155
- Continental 155
- African & Africana 148
- American 129
- Medieval Christian 106
- Jewish 86
- Japanese & Korean 77
- Latin American 59
- Persian 38
Philosophy vs science
Science settles questions by observation, measurement and experiment. Philosophy works on the questions where those methods run out, and often on the questions that come before them.
The two were once a single enterprise. Physics used to be called natural philosophy: Isaac Newton’s great work of 1687 is titled Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. As questions found experimental methods, whole fields, physics first and psychology much later, became sciences of their own.
But the boundary keeps producing new philosophy. What makes a claim scientific is not something an experiment can decide. Quantum theory is mathematically agreed, yet what it tells us about the world is disputed. Neuroscience can correlate experience with brain activity, but whether that explains why there is experience at all is a philosophical question. The relationship is usually one of division of labour rather than rivalry, although exactly where the line falls is itself debated.
Philosophy vs religion
Religions typically offer answers to the deepest questions, about the divine, the self, death and how to live, grounded in revelation, scripture, tradition and practice. Philosophy asks many of the same questions but, on the usual account, relies only on reasons that any careful inquirer can examine, whatever their faith or lack of it.
The two are not simply opposed. Many major philosophers were also religious thinkers, among them Śaṅkara, Ibn Sina, Maimonides and Aquinas; others, such as David Hume, were sharp critics. Philosophy of religion asks what kind of claim a religious claim is. Natural theology asks whether argument alone can settle whether God exists. Epistemology asks whether something can be known because it was disclosed rather than discovered. All three questions are mapped here with theist and non-theist answers set out fairly, and no verdict.
What is philosophy for, and why study it?
One honest answer is that some questions cannot be avoided, only answered carelessly. Everyone already holds views about what makes an act right, whether we are free, what death means and what gives a life meaning. Studying philosophy means examining those views instead of inheriting them unexamined. Plato reports Socrates telling his jury that the unexamined life is not worth living, and that remains the classic statement of the case.
Philosophy also trains skills that travel well:
- reading a difficult argument and restating it fairly, in its strongest form;
- seeing when a conclusion does not follow, and when an argument that looks like a fallacy is actually reasonable;
- writing clearly about abstract problems;
- disagreeing with someone without misrepresenting them.
These are among the reasons philosophy graduates go into law, policy, journalism, medicine, technology and teaching, and why philosophers now sit on panels about medicine, the environment and artificial intelligence. The simplest reason, though, is that the questions are real and they are already yours.
How to start learning philosophy
You do not need a reading list to begin. You need one question you care about. A few ways in:
- Read philosophy for beginners for where to start and what to read first.
- Get the lie of the land in the branches of philosophy, from metaphysics to the philosophy of X.
- Open The Coordinates and follow any question that catches you. Each card gives the rival answers, the thinkers who held them and what each answer costs.
- Browse the philosophical questions with all their rival answers in one place.
- When you have a view, or a doubt, ask a question and argue it through with others.
Or begin with ten questions that philosophers in every tradition have asked, in an order that builds:
- 1
- 2
- 3
How do we know anything?
2.1 Theories of KnowledgeWhat has to be added to a true belief to make it knowledge? - 4
- 5
What makes an act right or wrong?
3.2 Normative EthicsWhat should I look at to tell whether an act is right? - 6
- 7
How should we be governed?
6.4 Political PhilosophyWhen is political power legitimate, and what may it rightly do? - 8
What happens when we die?
6.20 Philosophy of DeathCan something be bad for you if you are not there for it? - 9
- 10
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.