Philosophy

Philosophy, though very difficult to precisely define, is generally considered to be the study or pursuit of wisdom. At least, that is what the basic etymology of the word points to: "philo" meaning 'love of', and "sophia" meaning 'wisdom'. Thus, philosophy would be the pursuit of this loved wisdom. In Ancient Greece, this was what philosophy was practiced as - however, in centuries since then, the term has been used in an expanded sense, to where 'wisdom' could be said to be "learning the best way to think about things". Now, there are many ways to think about things (I.e. best way to study politics, best way to think about right action, etc.) - and as such philosophy has dozens upon dozens of sub-fields. In fact, there are countless fields in philosophy simply titled "Philosophy of X" (e.g. philosophy of science, philosophy of history, art, politics, etc.) for this reason. However, the over-arching study of philosophy can be sufficiently divided up into 4 main branches: metaphysics, epistemology, axiology, and logic. Many of these fields overlap, though it is helpful to split them up into that way. Metaphysics is the study of what is (existence, necessary beings, etc.). Epistemology is the study of how we know what is - specifically: knowledge, how knowledge can be obtained, what the necessary standards for 'sufficient' knowledge are, and similar questions. Axiology is the study of value, with axiology containing the sub-fields of ethics (I.e. what actions are valuable?), aesthetics (I.e. what is beauty?), etc. Lastly, logic - put simply - is the study of proper reasoning. Through both mathematical and symbolic notation, logic is increasingly a field that interconnects with many others. Though philosophy may be seen as a field that is subjective and un-scientific, what cannot be denied is that philosophy is a field that is rigorous, skeptical [of new claims], and is one of the oldest and longest standing fields in academia.