Philosophy

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Areas

There's a lot of history of being enthusiastic about learning things -- philosophy literally means "love of wisdom".

There's also a lot of earlier history of that, which is easy enough to oversee and summarize well enough, that almost feel like a coherent whole.

Yet by the twentieth century things we'd started addressing more things, in more detail, and things got complicated enough that we wanted to split things into more bite-sized categories, roughly:

Epistemology

What can we know? How do we know it? How does knowledge relate to truth, belief, and justification?

In a wider sense, how does truth telling work for you, and what

Metaphysics

What is there, and how does it work?

...usually starting in an abstract sense, hoping to get a little more concrete.

Ethics

How do we decide what's good and not so good?

What do we mean when we say what is right and wrong?

What makes things good? How do you decide?

Also Meta-ethics, which (among other things) takes moral propositions, and tries to figure out their meaning, and how their truth-value (if any) can be determined.

Can you say such things objectively, or is it only ever a fluid agreement? A little more practically, are there a lot of patterns that even cultures without much shared history all happen to hold true?

Making the distinction between meta-, normative and applied is itself meta-ethics.

Logic

How do we reason about things?

And, relatedly, how do we argue in a way that others can follow the meaning of?

Aeshetics

Why are some things so nice?