Areas of philosophy.

The main traditional areas of philosophy are ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, logic, and the history of philosophy. Ethics is the study of practical reasoning and the normative questions which it gives rise to, as we have seen above. Branches of ethics include political and social philosophy as well as applied ethics, which includes bio-ethics, business ethics, and environmental ethics, among others. Epistemology is the study of knowledge and justification, and of the family of concepts which are involved in our assessing claims to knowledge or justified belief. ‘Metaphysics’ (literally ‘after’ + ‘physics’) was originally the title of those books in the collection of Aristotle’s works that came after the Physics. (Note: what you find in a non-academic bookstore under the label ‘metaphysics’ is usually not metaphysics in the academic sense at all.) In its most general use, ‘metaphysics’ covers any inquiry that raises questions about reality that lie behind or beyond those science is capable of answering. In this sense, ‘metaphysics’ and ‘philosophy’, as characterized above, are pretty much synonymous. However, more narrowly, metaphysics is usually taken to comprise mostly questions about ontology (i.e., about what there is, what things exist), and about a set of basic concepts such as those of existence, truth, causation, time, thought, substance, property, and the like. Metaphysics is also the traditional location of comprehensive philosophical systems, such as those of Spinoza, Leibniz, or Hegel. Logic is a branch of epistemology which deals with valid arguments, either inductive or deductive, particularly with respect to the forms of such arguments. It plays an important methodological role in philosophy, since philosophy is in part concerned with how much argument can establish a priori. Since the early 20th Century, the importance of logic in philosophy, especially formal logic, has grown greatly. The benefit of this is that it has facilitated the precise expression of both philosophical problems and of proffered solutions. But this has also had the disadvantage of putting much philosophical research beyond the reach of the general public, contributing to the (mistaken) perception that academic philosophy has lost touch with the big questions of philosophy and is irrelevant to the lives of most people. The history of philosophy, the last major traditional area in our list, bears a special relation to philosophy which the history of most disciplines do not bear to their current practice. It is not merely that studying the work of great philosophers in the past is valuable as history, or as the history of ideas, but that a proper and deep understanding of the history of philosophy is necessary for an adequate appreciation and understanding of contemporary philosophy–and because, in part due to the nature of philosophical inquiry, there is much that the great philosophers of the past still have to offer in our continuing attempts to grapple with some of the great unsolved problems of philosophy.

These traditional areas of philosophy are supplemented by a number of additional areas of intense study in philosophy centered around philosophical questions that arise about one or another fundamental aspect of human activity. A partial list includes the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of action, decision theory, the philosophy of language, philosophical logic, aesthetics, the philosophy of culture, feminism, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of science and its subdisciplines, such as the philosophy of the natural sciences, which includes the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of biology, and the philosophy of the social sciences, which includes the philosophy of history, the philosophy of psychology, and, a recent addition, the philosophy of economics, and the study of the philosophical thought and systems of other cultures–e.g., ancient civilizations such as those of India and China, traditional societies such those of the Amerindians, and contemporary cultural and social systems such as those of Latin America. It should be emphasized that despite the division of philosophy into these different fields, it is almost impossible to undertake the investigation of any philosophical problem or question without having to raise and address questions in other fields of philosophy. Thus, for example, in considering questions that arise in ethics, one is often led to questions in the philosophy of mind, action, and language, all of which raise fundamental questions about our natures as rational agents. In addition to these subject areas, particular historical figures are subjects of intense study, such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mill, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Russell, Husserl, Moore, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre, and many other major figures. Likewise, more recent philosophical traditions are often subjects of study in their own right, notably the 20th century traditions in continental and analytic philosophy.

This list of areas of philosophical study is not exhaustive or static. The core disciplines of philosophy are unlikely to shift, but philosophical inquiry is responsive and responsible to the society and culture in which it takes place. For example, new technologies can give rise to new areas of applied philosophy. Bioethics is a relatively recent field of applied ethics which has arisen specifically in response to developments in biotechnology which enable people to manipulate the biological features of organisms to a hitherto unprecedented degree. Similarly, philosophical inquiry has responded to practical social and political problems which have given rise to questions relating to gender, race, international relations, and differing cultural traditions.