|
|
Beginning of Philosophy The word philosophy comes from the two Greek words philein, which means “to love” and sophia, which means “knowledge” or “wisdom”. Thales: One of the first known Greek philosophers, was doing speculative physics when he claimed that everything in the natural world was made of water. Leucuppus and Democritus: Arrived at the conclusion that all matter was made from tiny particles (atoms) that were similar except for their size and shape; differences in larger bodies were accounted for by means of their different arrangements. *Early thinkers thought of physics as a part of philosophy, and this view persisted over 2000 years. The full title of Isaac Newton’s Principles, in which Newton set forth his famous theories of mechanics, mathematics, and stronomy, is Mathematical principles of Natural Philosophy. Philosophy: The definition of philosophy as the love or pursuit of wisdom, but this is too vague and general. What philosophy is it self a philosophical issue, and the issue has not yet been settled. Philosophy is not an empirical science. Facts are often relevant to a philosophical question, but they cannot by themselves provide us with an answer. Many philosophical questions concern to norms. Normative questions ask about the value of something. These sciences are interested in finding out what things are, but they cannot tell us how things ought to be. Ethical or aesthetic norms are standards of one kind or another and we apply them when we decide for example what is right or wrong, good or bad… When we voluntarily choose to do something, nothing makes us choose. Given the state of the world at the time you chose to extend a helping hand, you might have chosen not to do so. If this is tru- if nothing made you choose- then it follows that the choice cannot have been caused. If it had been caused, then given the state of the world at the time the cause happened, you could not have chosen not to make the choice.
|
