A person differs from an animal in many ways, both physical and mental. A dog or chimpanzee will never begin to think about the meaning of life or seek to know itself. The animal world exists at the level of instincts.
Thinking is a man’s favorite pastime. Every day we all ask ourselves a million questions and look for answers in the world around them.
Is this science?
It is constant thinking about the meaning of being that is the task that philosophy sets itself. And so it has been since the days of ancient thinkers. Is philosophy a science? Opinions differ on this point.
Usually, science means activities aimed at studying any section of a person’s life or the environment. In the exact sciences there are numbers, numbers. In literature there is prose, verse, etc. In any other science, one can see the material result of the work of scientists.
In philosophy, any result has only an intellectual character and consists in deriving hypotheses about human life, its principles. Philosophical science does not give unambiguous answers to any question. That is why many people prefer to give a negative answer to the question of whether philosophy is a science.
The art of thinking
We can say that philosophy is the art of thinking. It is believed that it was the very first science, which is a generalized knowledge of everything that happens around.
The first scientists on planet Earth consider philosophers. Then, as this or that direction of their thoughts developed, new trends appeared that separated into independent sciences. It will be useful to learn to those who think about whether philosophy is a science.
Subject of philosophy
It turns out that even without having unambiguous figures, judgments, axioms, philosophy can be attributed to the sciences. We will understand what exactly she is studying, what problems she solves, what great philosophers were and what they talked about many thousands of years ago.
So, we have found the answer to the question of whether philosophy is a science. Now we turn to the consideration of the subject of philosophy.
In the literature there are different ideas about what is the subject of this science. But there are identical explanations. If you group opinions, then philosophers believe that the subject of philosophy is:
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knowledge of the surrounding natural world;
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knowledge of the whole world;
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solving human problems;
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man’s relationship with God.
That is, through the subject of philosophy, the very essence of this science and what it studies follow.
Philosophy Functions
The role of philosophy in society is more easily recognized in the study of its functions. The following can be distinguished:
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Worldview.
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Methodological.
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Epistemological.
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Predictive.
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Integrating.
The essence of the first function is that philosophy develops a person’s thinking, understanding of the world in which he is located, and his place in society. Thanks to this, a person who is fond of philosophy is capable of sober self-criticism, as well as an assessment of the world around him.
Using the second function, philosophers of the world are trying to find the right key for learning something new. A key is understood as means of obtaining new information. For example, one of these is dialectics. She teaches to recognize the object of study on the basis of the study of absolutely all its parameters, properties, as well as interactions with other objects.
The epistemological function teaches a person a theoretical understanding of the creation of new methods of research and cognition. This means that through an understanding of the world, the thinker discovers new opportunities for studying the surrounding space.
The fourth function is that philosophy as a science helps people make predictions for the future. Thanks to the correct understanding of the natural properties of matter and the principles of the universe, many famous philosophers of the past managed to find those principles and patterns that are successfully used in modern sciences.
An integrating function helps a person to systematize his knowledge of the world, objects of research, etc. Philosophy as a science generalizes all information and puts it in its place, establishing specific relationships. Thus, a single base is formed, which helps to make new discoveries.
Each philosophical school has its own thoughts and ideas, an understanding of the universe. which they defend. Take a closer look at popular trends.
School of Philosophy
There are a lot of different directions of schools and movements that are engaged in or were engaged in philosophy. It is customary to separate them at the time of foundation. This is right, because the thoughts of man have changed over the ages, someone believed in gods, and someone believed that you need to focus on the power of scientific and technological progress.
The first schools of philosophy are generally called pre-Socratics. That's right, these are the trends that were present before the great philosopher Socrates. The most striking were the teachings of Pythagoras, Heraclitus and Democritus.
Oddly enough, although the schools of these philosophers began to exist about 4 thousand years BC, even then they did not try to explain strange phenomena due to magic and did not refer to the gods. In their opinion, it was possible to prove anything, the main thing was to find the necessary knowledge.
The role of philosophy in human life was also emphasized in the period that is called early Hellenism (existed from the 4th to the 1st century BC). Skepticism, stoicism and other schools talked about the fact that the whole world is interconnected and is one.
Some of them believed that man was created for obstacles, pain, suffering, while others, on the contrary, tried to find the shortest path to happiness. According to their conviction, happiness was inside the man himself, he did not need to be looked for in gods or other people, material values.
Middle Ages
The opinions of philosophers of the Middle Ages are connected with the thinking of people of that time. The rapidly growing popularity of the Christian religion has influenced the promotion of ideas related to God, a belief in something higher.
The philosophy of the time addressed the problems of scripture and worship.
Patristics, scholasticism, realism looked for answers to questions of the existence of the Almighty and served as a justification for his being. Nominalists denied that everything in the world is one. They believed that the world only becomes such inside the human brain and it is necessary to study each subject separately, without linking it to others.
There was also a mystical trend in the philosophy of that period, based on the assertion that a man does not need a church to search for God. All that is needed is solitude and remoteness from the outside world.
Renaissance
The European philosophy of this era is remembered thanks to many outstanding and great people. Everyone knows about Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, N. Machiavelli. They are connected with the new direction of philosophy - humanism.
It is known that in this era God is leaving the foreground. Primary values are changing in the minds of people. Man and the world (nature) become the most important objects of study of philosophers. Humanism determines that man is above everything - he is the pinnacle of everything.
Of course, it cannot be said that religion began to be denied in the Renaissance. Philosophers have begun increasingly to say that the church is the work of man, and any person is imperfect. This justified the craving of the church for worldly goods and its depravity. A new value has become a person who should strive to be ideal, that is, similar to God.
New philosophy
The main directions of the new philosophy are empiricism, rationalism, subjective idealism, agnosticism. These directions developed from the 16th to the 18th century.
The first to use the deductive method was not Sherlock Holmes. This way of knowing life was proposed by the rationalists. They believed that in order to answer any question it is necessary to go step by step from generalized information to more detailed facts. So you can know the world around you, find the answers.
Empiricism suggested that from the moment of birth, a person is a blank sheet, images and text on which appear in the process of growing up, the emergence of a new experience. And in order to know the world, it is worth using the knowledge gained earlier, checking their authenticity and compliance with the truth.
Subjective idealism implied the fallacy of any teaching. To learn something you need to have true knowledge, and a person simply can not have the necessary information.
The whole world is perceived through the prism of man’s own consciousness. That is, each phenomenon that can be seen, heard, felt, processed by the mind, and it gives its own conclusion.
Someone likes the blue color, while someone hates it. So with everything else. It is impossible to fully investigate anything without knowing the truth.
Representatives of the philosophy of agnosticism tried to prove that any knowledge should be discovered on the basis of experience and logic. They believed that in science there is no place for any theory, and everything should be known exclusively by experimental, research methods.
Farther and farther, philosophers gave themselves away from medieval ideas on religion.
Age of Enlightenment
Of course, considering the periods of philosophy, one cannot ignore this era, which in the 18th century gave us great thinkers such as Voltaire and P. Holbach.
Often the time of these philosophers is called the second Renaissance, because both there and here you can observe a new round in philosophy, associated with the denial of religion, which “got into” everyone’s head. Moreover, Western philosophy has knelt down before their ideas.
The main values for a person of the Enlightenment are the following:
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The cult of man.
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The cult of reason and science.
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Belief in scientific progress.
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The absolute denial of religion and everything connected with it.
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The idea of equality and universal enlightenment.
What can I say, if in the 18th century the car was first created. Scientific and technological progress increasingly influenced the consciousness of people. The need to describe incomprehensible phenomena by the manifestation of divine power or mythical origin has disappeared.
The universal idea that a person is independently capable of creating tools and mechanisms that can automatically work, inspired a sense of superiority over all living organisms.
Postclassical philosophy
So, we got to the 19th century. Many contemporary scientists associate the philosophy of that time with great surnames: Marx, Engels, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and others. All of them are ranked among those or other areas of philosophical thought, which are given below.
The following areas relate to postclassical philosophy:
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materialism;
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anthropology;
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positivism;
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irrationalism;
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pragmatism;
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philosophy of life.
Let us consider in more detail the most popular teachings of them.
Materialism
The main ideological inspirers of this trend were K. Marx and F. Engels. Their books were forced to read by all schoolchildren and students in the Soviet Union - this is not surprising, because in those days the ideas about communist materialism were one of the main ones.
It’s even more correct to say not materialism, but Marxism, which suggests a way of understanding the world through a material prism. The main philosophies of this direction were as follows:
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Everything in the world consists of physical matter. It is eternal and has always been; no one has created it.
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The objectivity of the world is not affected by the consciousness of any person. Everything in the world can be known.
The main difference between Marxism is not the deduced methods of knowing the world, but the methods of improving it, transforming it in a revolutionary way. That is, the need to know something is losing its meaning, it is believed that this is a waste of time. It is best to derive a pattern, familiarize yourself with the rules, and then change them to fit your needs.
The main drawback that everyone felt on themselves back in the days of the USSR was the lack of recognition of the individuality of a person and the need for spiritual enlightenment of people.
Anthropologism
The German classic L. Feuerbach believed that man is a product of nature. This was the basis of his anthropological philosophy. He considered the main feeling of love, which is the main engine. According to him, religion is the basis for love.
In order to understand the foundations of the universe, it is necessary to fully understand and investigate the structure of man himself - both physical and psychological.
Positivism
The name of this branch of philosophy comes from its basic fundamental statements. The necessary knowledge was called positive (or positive). To search for them, it is necessary to use the empirical data of all sciences, as well as those obtained by intertwining the teachings of each of them.
In other words, positivism argued that philosophy cannot exist as a separate unit of knowledge, but should be a synthesis of discoveries of other scientific fields.
