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Philosophy > Related Articles
From Citizendium, the Citizens' Compendium
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Parent topics
Subdisciplines
As with any field of academic study, philosophy has a number of subdisciplines. Philosophy in fact seems to have a huge number of subdisciplines, in no small part due to the fact that there tends to be a "philosophy of" nearly everything else that is studied. The beginner is invited particularly to pay attention to logic, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics, and political philosophy as--arguably, of course--the "central disciplines" of philosophy.
- Aesthetics: the study of basic philosophical questions about art and beauty.
- Continental philosophy: a broad movement in modern philosophy from those in France and Germany; often juxtaposed with Analytical philosophy (which itself is roughly mapped to Anglo-American philosophy.
- Epistemology: the study of knowledge, its nature, possibility, and justification.
- Ethics: the study of what makes actions right or wrong, and of how theories of right action can be applied to special moral problems. Subdisciplines include meta-ethics, value theory, theory of conduct, and applied ethics.
- History of philosophy: the study of what (mainly dead) philosophers have written, its interpretation, and who influenced whom. This differs from the history of ideas in that the history of philosophy involves philosophical engagement with the positions and arguments being studied.
- Logic: the study of the standards of correct argumentation.
- Meta-philosophy: the study of philosophical method and the goals of philosophy.
- Metaphysics: the study of the most basic categories of things, such as existence, objects, properties, causality, and so forth.
- Ontology: understanding and attempting to provide answers to questions of the nature of being and the classification of existing things
- Philosophy of biology: the philosophical study of some basic concepts of biology, including the notion of a species.
- Philosophy of education: the philosophical study of the purpose and most basic methods of education or learning.
- Philosophy of language: the philosophical study of the concepts of meaning, truth and reference.
- Philosophy of law and Jurisprudence: are the study of the basis of law (authority and relevance), and its link with morality.
- Philosophy of mind: the philosophical study of the nature of the mind, and its relation to the body and the rest of the world.
- Philosophy of perception: the philosophical study of topics related to perception, especially the question what the "immediate objects" of perception are.
- Philosophy of physics: the philosophical study of some basic concepts of physics, including space, time, and force.
- Philosophy of psychology: the philosophical study of some fundamental questions about the methods and concepts of psychology and psychiatry, such as the meaningfulness of Freudian concepts; this is sometimes treated as including philosophy of mind.
- Philosophy of religion: the philosophical study of questions such as the meaning of the concept of God, the rationality of belief in the existence of God, the relationship netween morality and religion, etc.
- Philosophy of science: includes not only, as subdisciplines, the "philosophies of" the special sciences (i.e., physics, biology, etc.), but also questions about induction, scientific method, scientific progress, etc.
- Philosophy of social sciences: the philosophical study of some basic concepts, methods, and presuppositions of social sciences such as sociology and economics.
- Political philosophy: the philosophical study of questions about societies and social interaction, including the nature and justification of the state, justice, freedom, law, and punishment.
There are quite a few others; feel free to complete the list.
