What Is Philosophy? Why Study It?

<p>What is philosophy? Philosophy can sometimes be a hard word to define since our culture uses it in many ways. However, the academic study of philosophy could be broadly summed up by three areas of study: the study of existence (metaphysics), the study of knowledge (epistemology), and the study of ethics. Philosophy deals with big ideas that shape cultures, including ours, and the ideas of our cultures shape how we think. Philosophy attempts to answer ultimate questions: Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? If we want to understand how our culture thinks and why it promotes the ideas it does, we have to understand the philosophy that gave birth to those ideas and the history of how they came to be accepted.</p>

What is philosophy? Philosophy can sometimes be a hard word to define since our culture uses it in many ways. However, the academic study of philosophy could be broadly summed up by three areas of study: the study of existence (metaphysics), the study of knowledge (epistemology), and the study of ethics. Philosophy deals with big ideas that shape cultures, including ours, and the ideas of our cultures shape how we think. Philosophy attempts to answer ultimate questions: Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? If we want to understand how our culture thinks and why it promotes the ideas it does, we have to understand the philosophy that gave birth to those ideas and the history of how they came to be accepted.

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Intro to Philosophy Part 1

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