Simply Me (continued)

Topic #1 - Philosophy (continued)

"Philosophy is a walk on slippery rocks..." - Edie Brickell

      Hello again, friends and family!  As I mentioned last time, the topic of 'Philosophy' is much, much more than an individual’s Core Personal Philosophy.  In fact, it is such a voluminous subject that pretty much everything I plan to discuss about "Simply Me" fits into one of the three traditional branches of Philosophy: Natural Philosophy; Moral Philosophy; or Metaphysical Philosophy (or simply Metaphysics).

Natural Philosophy, or Natural Science, as it’s known these days, is the aggregate of the various sciences that deal with all the objects and processes in the Universe that can be observed, described, predicted, empirically tested, and understood.  The hallmark of these various fields of Natural Science is that accuracy, quality, and validity of the empirical evidence is confirmed by the repeatability of the findings.  This branch of Philosophy is further divided into two principle branches: life sciences and physical sciences; with life sciences comprising the fields that involve the study of living organisms (such as anatomy, botany, genetics, molecular biology, and zoology), and physical sciences comprising the fields that study non-living systems (such as astronomy, chemistry, earth sciences, and physics).  Human history is replete with men and women who applied their Human Reasoning to ascertain bits and pieces of the fundamentals of nature; intellectual heroes such as Leucippus, Pythagoras, Euclid, Aristotle, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Hypatia of Alexandria, Claudius Ptolemy, Jabir ibn Hayyan, Harun al-Rashid, Abu Nasr Mansur, Hildegard of Bingen, Thomas Aquinas, Galileo Galilei, Maria Winkelmann, Tyco Brahe, Maria Sybilla Merian, John Locke, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Jefferson, Antoine Lavoisier, Caroline Herschel, Marie Sklodowska-Curie, Maria Mitchell, Arthur Rudolph, Lise Meitner, Otto Hahn, Inge Lehmann, Emmy Noether, Wernher von Braun, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, Chien-Shiung Wu, Arthur C. Clarke, Tikvah Alper, Isaac Asimov, Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Virginia Gerstenfeld Heinlein, Jane Goodall, Steve Wozniak, Robert Metcalf, and Robert Jarvik.  This may seem like a series of ‘begats’ out of the Old Testament, but each of these individuals, and many more like them, should be mentioned, and often, for the contributions they each made to promote the advancement of Human Knowledge; oft times at the expense of their own lives as they shook up the hide-bound beliefs of their respective times. 

The second Branch of Philosophy is Moral Philosophy, more commonly known as Ethics.  It’s the Branch of Philosophy that focuses on codifying, defending, and recommending the concepts of Right and Wrong conduct; seeking to resolve questions of Human Morality by defining such concepts as Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, Virtue and Vice, and Justice and Crime.  The three major fields of Moral Philosophy are Applied Ethics (the study of an individual’s obligated actions in any given situation), Meta Ethics (the theoretical study of the meaning and reference points of a hypothesis of morality, and the relation of said hypothesis to Truth), and Normative Ethics (the study of how a person determines the moral course of action in any given situation encountered in that person’s daily life).  Like Natural Philosophy, Moral Philosophy has had great Human thinkers over the last three millennia: Ptahhotep, Vyasa, Hammurabi, Rishi Narayana, Rishabha Dev, Lao Tzu, Zarathustra, Kanada, Thales, Ezekiel, Siddhartha Gautama, Nahum, Cyrus the Great, Pythagoras, Leucippus, Euclid, Confucius, Plato, Boethius, Diogenes of Sinope, Aristotle, Mo Tzu, Epicurus, Han Fei, Archimedes, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Philo of Alexandria, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine of Hippo, al-Kindi, Johannes Eriugena, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Khaldun, Anselm of Canterbury, William of Ockham, Thomas Aquinas, Niccolo Machiavelli, Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther, Francis Bacon, Rene` Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ayn Rand, and so many more.  Each of these Philosophers, within their various cultures, have tried to use their Reason to analyze and define the morality of every facet of everyday life, as well as the ethical ramifications of the practical application in the real world of the theoretical research of any of the fields of Natural Philosophy, often finding themselves opposing conventional wisdom.

The final branch of Philosophy is Metaphysics.  This particular branch of Philosophy is a bit more difficult to define as it deals with intangibles, concerned as it is with explaining the fundamental nature of Being and the various elements in the Universe that influence that Being; e.g., the dimensions of space and time, objects that occupy said space and time, cause and effect, possibility, uncertainty, and even existence itself.  The three principle categories of Metaphysical Philosophy are: Cosmology (the study of the origin, evolution, structure, dynamics, and eventual end of the physical and spiritual Universe); Epistemology (the study of the nature and scope of knowledge and justified belief, sometimes referred to as the “Theory of Knowledge”); and Ontology (the study of all the states and categories of Being and their relations, or, to put it more plainly, it basically deals with the what, how, and where of existence).  Unfortunately, because Metaphysics deals with so much that is intangible, the various metaphysical fields tend to be fraught with charlatans and grifters, preying on the desperate, the gullible, and the ignorant.  But, frauds aside, many of history’s great thinkers have tackled the Metaphysics of the Universe: Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, Bertrand Russell, Aristotle, Plato, Jean-Paul Sartre, Rene’ Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Leucippus, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William of Ockham, Al-Ghazali, Friedrich Nietzsche, Werner Heisenberg, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Albert Einstein, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Martin Heidegger, just to name a few.

You may have noticed that a number of the Great Philosophers are listed in more than one branch of Philosophy.  It’s because every field of Philosophy is intertwined; each field of study leading to questions in another.  The interdisciplinary overlap had (and still has) Astronomers studying Epistemology, Biologists looking into Ethics, Computer Programmers considering Ontology. 

As you can see from my little summary of the topic, to say, “Let’s talk Philosophy,” can mean just about anything.  Therefore, to help things along, I’m going to break up the subjects I discuss into chew-able bites.  Going forward, most of these subjects will be addressed within their respective sub-categories.  For now, as I continue to delve into ‘Philosophy’, I’ll be discussing two things: my own Core Personal Philosophy, and what, beyond Personal Philosophy, the Average Jane and Joe in our culture thinks of when he, or she, hears the “P” word; namely Belief, Faith, Religion, and Spirituality.  Yep, next time I’m going to jump right in and lay out my positions on the quartet of subjects that has alternately caused both, the greatest comfort, and the greatest misery, in the history of Humanity.

Until then, Be Well...

© James P. Rice 2011, 2016