2. Philosophy: An Overview

This section does not go deeply in examining and analyzing philosophy and its nature in detail, it just generally answers the question “What is philosophy?” and seeks to discuss some major philosophical questions, and the main areas of philosophy based mainly on Nuttal (2002).

1. What is Philosophy?

In his (2002) Nuttal suggests two answers are frequently given to the question “What is philosophy?” One is that “philosophy is an activity rather than a subject -in other words, you do philosophy rather than learn about it. The other is that philosophy is largely a matter of conceptual analysis -it is thinking about thinking.” Both these suggestions, according to Nuttal, contain more than a germ of truth but are unsatisfactory, giving little or no idea of the content of philosophy. The most direct way of seeing what philosophy is about is to look at the sorts of questions that philosophers think are important and how they go about answering them. There are many ways of dividing up the subject areas of philosophy.

2. Some Philosophical Questions

The philosophers have considered the sorts of questions and they have tried to answer them. Let us take a look at some philosophical questions below as presented by Nuttall (2002: 2) as follows:

-Do our senses, of sight, touch, hearing, taste and smell, present us with a true picture of the world around us?

-Does every event have a cause? If every event does have a cause, is this incompatible with being able to make free choices?

-We each have a body of flesh and bones, and we also have a mind; are minds separable from bodies (could we have minds without bodies)?; do minds and bodies interact and, if so, how?

-We observe certain patterns and regularities in the world around us. On the basis of such, essentially limited, experiences we propose laws of nature. These laws we take to be universal, applying to the totality of objects existing in the infinity of space and the eternity of time. Indeed, perhaps we take it that our laws apply beyond this, to possible objects in parallel universes. What can justify such claims?

-When we judge that someone has done something morally good (or bad), are we doing any more than expressing our own personal views? Can morality be anything other than subjective?

-Is it the duty of government to try to redress the imbalance of wealth within society or does any government lack the legitimacy to do this, so such attempts at redistribution are morally equivalent to slave labour?

Because of making observation or doing experiments differs in each case, according to Nuttal “we cannot answer these questions [above].” For this reason, Nuttal (2002) presents as follows:

If we doubt our senses, what are we going to check them against? We have developed all sorts of instruments capable of making more precise and more sensitive measurements than our senses, but we rely on our senses to read these instruments. In any case, if we doubt whether our senses give sufficient evidence that objects really exist, then we must doubt the existence of the instruments themselves. When we ask whether all events have causes, we can produce examples of events that do have a cause (although philosophers have questioned even this) but we cannot observe that every event has a cause. And if it really is the case that every event has a cause, what experiments could be conducted to show this to be compatible with free will? Our actions may appear to be free, but if his feeling of freedom were an illusion, how would we ever find out? (pp. 2-3)

Having suggested ways in which the questions cannot be answered, Nuttal (2002: 3) points out that “One of the first things we discover in philosophy is the way in which questions that at first sight look quite separate have a bearing on each other.”

3. Three Main Areas of Philosophy

In fact, there are many ways of dividing up the subject areas of philosophy. None of them is entirely satisfactory, since there will always be topics that cut across or fail to fit neatly into the divisions. Nevertheless, based mainly on suggesttion by Anthony Quinton in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Nuttall (2002) displays a better idea of the scope of philosophy by the following three broad areas: (i) Metaphysics: This area of philosophy deals with the ultimate nature of reality; (ii) Epistemology: Here concern is with whether and how knowledge of reality is possible; and (iii) The area of moral and political philosophy: These areas deal with how we conduct ourselves within the world.

There are, however, other ways of dividing up the subject, the order in which the three areas have been set out above might suggest an order of priority: what there is, what we can know about it and what we do about it.

And as pointed out by Miller (2007) that “philosophy of language deals with some of the most profound and difficult topics in any area of philosophy.” Thus, we know clearly that philosophy of language plays a crucial and very important role on studying philosophy. And language itself, of course, is essential to be used for studying the nature of philosophy in particular and the world in general.