NOTEThe primary source of this post is Wikipedia unless otherwise cited.
It is an interesting assumption that people without background in academic Philosophy think that one have to read the primary sources with verify little hand holding. Studying both Physics and Philosophy, I have literally never in my life met someone that tries to access Physics by reading the primary academic literature.
Literally nobody interested in Physics starts by trying to read Newton’s principia. If one is interested in Philosophy and doesn’t have any training in it, why not start with Philosophy textbooks just like how we study Physics in college? These university level introductory texts take these complex and often unfriendly primary texts and parse them for us.
Philosophy (‘love of wisdom’ in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, value, mind, and language. It is a rational and critical inquiry that reflects on its methods and assumptions. Philosophical questions can be grouped into several branches. Metaphysics, Epistemology, logic, and ethics are sometimes listed as the main branches.
Epistemology
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge. It is also known as theory of knowledge and aims to understand what knowledge is, how it arises, what its limits are, and what value it has. It further examines the nature of truth, belief, justification, and rationality. Some of the questions addressed by epistemologists include “By what method(s) can one acquire knowledge?”; “How is truth established?”; and “Can we prove causal relations?”
One area in epistemology asks how people acquire knowledge. According to empiricists, all knowledge is based on some form of experience. Rationalists reject this view and hold that some forms of knowledge, like innate knowledge, are not acquired through experience
Unlike the fields of Psychology which is also interested in beliefs and related cognitive processes by studying the beliefs people actually have and how people acquire them, epistemology explores how people should acquire beliefs. It determines which beliefs or forms of belief acquisition meet the standards or epistemic goals of knowledge and which ones fail, thereby providing an evaluation of beliefs. In this regard, epistemology is a normative discipline, whereas psychology and cognitive sociology are descriptive disciplines
The word epistemology comes from the ancient Greek terms ἐπιστήμη (episteme, meaning knowledge or understanding) and λόγος (logos, meaning study of or reason), literally, the study of knowledge. Despite its ancient roots, the word itself was only coined in the 19th century to designate this field as a distinct branch of philosophy.
Major Schools of Thought
Skepticism and Fallibilism
Philosophical skepticism questions the human ability to attain knowledge by challenging the foundations upon which knowledge claims rest. Some skeptics limit their criticism to specific domains of knowledge. For example, religious skeptics say that it is impossible to know about the existence of deities or the truth of other religious doctrines. Similarly, moral skeptics challenge the existence of moral knowledge and metaphysical skeptics say that humans cannot know ultimate reality. External world skepticism questions knowledge of external facts, whereas skepticism about other minds doubts knowledge of the mental states of others.
Fallibilism is another response to skepticism. Fallibilists agree with skeptics that absolute certainty is impossible. They reject the assumption that knowledge requires absolute certainty, leading them to the conclusion that fallible knowledge exists. They emphasize the need to keep an open and inquisitive mind, acknowledging that doubt can never be fully excluded, even for well-established knowledge claims like thoroughly tested scientific theories
Empiricism and Rationalism
The debate between empiricism and rationalism centers on the origins of human knowledge. Empiricism emphasizes that sense experience is the primary source of all knowledge. Some empiricists illustrate this view by describing the mind as a blank slate that only develops ideas about the external world through the sense data received from the sensory organs. According to them, the mind can attain various additional insights by comparing impressions, combining them, generalizing to form more abstract ideas, and deducing new conclusions from them. Empiricists say that all these mental operations depend on sensory material and do not function on their own.
Even though rationalists usually accept sense experience as one source of knowledge, they argue that certain forms of knowledge are directly accessed through reason without sense experience, like knowledge of mathematical and logical truths
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is the study of the most general features of reality, such as existence, objects and their properties, wholes and their parts, space and time, events, and causation. Metaphysicians attempt to answer basic questions including “Why is there something rather than nothing?”; “Of what does reality ultimately consist?”; and “Are humans free?”
The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics“Why is there anything at all?” or “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is a question about the reason for basic existence which has been raised or commented on by a range of philosophers and physicists who called it “the fundamental question of metaphysics”
Metaphysics encompasses a wide range of general and abstract topics. It investigates the nature of existence, the features all entities have in common, and their division into categories of being. An influential division is between particulars and universals. Particulars are individual unique entities, like a specific apple. Universals are general features that different particulars have in common, like the color red. Metaphysicians also explore the concepts of space, time, and change, and their connection to causality and the laws of nature. Other topics include how mind and matter are related, whether everything in the world is predetermined, and whether there is free will.
An important area in metaphysics is ontology. Some theorists identify it with general metaphysics. Ontology investigates concepts like being, becoming, and reality. It studies the categories of being and asks what exists on the most fundamental level. Another subfield of metaphysics is philosophical cosmology. It is interested in the essence of the world as a whole. It asks questions including whether the universe has a beginning and an end and whether it was created by something else
A key topic in metaphysics concerns the question of whether reality only consists of physical things like matter and energy. Alternative suggestions are that mental entities (such as souls and experiences) and abstract entities (such as numbers) exist apart from physical things. Another topic in metaphysics concerns the problem of identity. One question is how much an entity can change while still remaining the same entity. According to one view, entities have essential and accidental features. They can change their accidental features but they cease to be the same entity if they lose an essential feature
The roots of metaphysics lie in antiquity with speculations about the nature and origin of the universe, like those found in the Upanishads in ancient India, Daoism in ancient China, and pre-Socratic philosophy in ancient Greece. During the subsequent medieval period in the West, discussions about the nature of universals were influenced by the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. The modern period saw the emergence of various comprehensive systems of metaphysics, many of which embraced idealism. In the 20th century, traditional metaphysics in general and idealism in particular faced various criticisms, which prompted new approaches to metaphysical inquiry.
IdealismIdealism in philosophy, also known as philosophical realism or metaphysical idealism, is the set of metaphysical perspectives asserting that, most fundamentally, reality is equivalent to mind, spirit, or consciousness; that reality is entirely a mental construct; or that ideas are the highest type of reality or have the greatest claim to being considered “real”.
Wang Yangming (王阳明 )‘s thought has been interpreted as a kind of idealism in China:
(To be continued…)