Philosophy Types: any good Framework that summarizes What Philosophy is About?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I continue in my quest to understand Philosophy better. Are there existing, simple Frameworks or Diagrams that try to depict the scope of Philosophy?

What I do NOT mean:
A Timeline: A historical walk through great Eastern and Western thinkers is important and I have read a bunch of them, but that’s not what I mean - it shows events along the way and when Philosphers live.

An “Parts in Orbit” chart - where the word “Philosophy” is in the middle, and the different subcategories are in shapes around it, pointing in. Helpful to know the subcategories, but not what Philosophy really is.

What it could be:
I can see a diagram that starts with the two Fundamental Questions of Philosophy - as I have gleaned them from my reading:

External: Why is there Something instead of Nothing?
Internal: How should a Human live their life?

I could then see adding the Objectives that we seek through Philosophy:

  • Answers, whether they be Scientific Theories or Religious Systems
  • Methods, such as meditation/contemplation or empirical research

Then what? My point is that it seems like there should be a framework!! Put The Questions some place on the page, put our Objectives some place in relation to the Questions and the frame what Philosophers do to get from one to the other.

Anyone know of anything like this? Googling is really hard “Philosophy Framework” gets links to a person’s presentation on their Business or Teaching Philosophy. Not that.

Argh.

2

One bump. Via email, Doper Crotalus says I can’t be talking Philosophy if I’m trying to come up with a simple way to communicate something :wink:

But doesn’t somebody have a TED Talk or some self help, MOOC-type YouTube video purporting to explain the Secrets of Plato so you can succeed in business and be Thinkier than your Friends? Those guys would have to have a diagram, right? Where’s that one?

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Maybe you have actually come up with an idea for something that has not been tried before, or at least not published. The trail is yours to blaze!

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There are different branches of philosophy (epistemology, aesthetics, etc.), if that’s anything like what you’re talking about. A little googling led me to this list, which linked to this chart, if it’s anything at all like what you’re thinking of.

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First of all: Thank you!!! It’s a Philosophy Chart, so it’s something.

It’s better than a Parts in Orbit chart because it has more information. But it doesn’t start with The Fundamental Questions, etc.

Hmm. Crotalus, you know, I am open to that if that is the case. But really?? Philosophy’s been around since Humans could noodle and no one lays out a basic overview that isn’t just a taxonomy of the subcategories, or a list of major Thinkers and breakthroughs over time??

That just seems hard to believe.

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I think part of the problem is that ‘what philosophy is about’ is, at least in part, what philosophy is about. It’s not that there’s some set of objectives that, once met, means that we could close the lid on this whole philosophy-business and go home. Consequently, philosophy has been about different things to different people at different times; whether something is philosophy isn’t decided by fitting it to some definition, but rather, by a set of family resemblances across object, method, and aim.

That said, some resources you might find useful are the philosophical connections site, which is however ordered by philosophers rather than topics, wikipedia’s outline of philosophy, which I think could perhaps be used to draw up the kind of diagram you want by simply following the links; and offline, there’s The Philosophy Book which, while pop-philosophy, manages to give a surprisingly well-rounded run-down of many thinkers and their thoughts, and Antony Kenny’s New History of Western Philosophy, which is much more scholarly, but also dense and voluminous.

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Ooh, I just found where somebody has drawn up an enormous chart of philosophers and their influences upon one another, using data from wikipedia. It seems to do pretty well at finding the most influential figures, and also at identifying communities—schools—of philosophical thought. No idea how useful it really is, though.

Maybe one could use the same methodology to produce the sort of graph you’re looking for…

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I think the OP is asking whether there is a Standard Model of philosophy, akin to what one finds in physics.

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A quick and dirty primer of political philosophy based oncows… Perhaps not what you want , WordMan, but still funny.

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Can I just say that my client’s firewall is driving me crazy? I’m on my smartphone for now but can’t use it for detailed thinking or writing. Argh.

I will not be able to get to this until tomorrow - I have an evening event. Sorry.

I’m not looking for a Standard Model per se, but I get why you mentioned it.

I would assert that if you boil down all Philosophical approaches and players, they are trying to answer 1 or both of the questions I state above. Or they are commenting on how one should go about answering them. Is that a standard model? Or is that simply a reasonable generalization?

Has anyone ever even asserted that part - that Philosophy starts with those two questions? I know in Jim Holts book Why Does The World Exist? He does a great job of showing how all externally-directed Philosphical questions boil down to “Why is there something vs Nothing.” I have read many places about how one’s internal philosophy is all about How to Live one’s Life.

Has anybody ever said “Philosophy boils down to answering these two questions”? Seems like a reasonable statement to make. ??

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Philosophy is just thinking critically about stuff. The problem with trying to describe modern philosophy is that whenever we’ve managed to think critically about a specific sort of thing to the point of making a nice rigourous area of study we parcel it off as a new discipline and don’t call it philosophy anymore. We call it physics, or economics, or whatever. So modern philosophy is thinking critically about a variety of topics that have resisted being turned into a more rigourous area of study. This variety of topics are not particularly closely related, except insofar as they are all resistant to decisive empirical analysis (so far). It follows that one can’t describe philosophy as an area of study in the same way one would with chemistry or psychology, because it’s not the study of one sort of thing. It’s the study of everything we haven’t managed to turn into a science of some sort.

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This is how I think about it as well.

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Plenty have claimed it boils down to just one question: What’s all this shit?

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Well, Kant somewhat famously argued that all philosophy basically boils down to the three questions “What can I know?”, “What should I do?”, and “What may I hope?”, if that’s the sort of thing you’re after.

Personally, I think that really the most fundamental question is the second one. I like to tell a little fable about the first human-like being (wherever down the phylogenetic tree one might want to draw that boundary) that came to, in whatever way, reflect on their actions. See, an animal is basically forced to act by instinct and reflex—it does not reflect on its choices.

But at some point, there must have been a being, perhaps ape-like, that had two options, with no immediate force for taking either. So, in some sense, it must have wondered: which option should I take?

And it’s really from there that philosophy (and science by extension) flows. Because there’s a lot of things in that simple question that need further clarification. One pertains to the ‘I’—in order to have such a choice, the being in question must model itself as in some sense distinct from the world. But what is that ‘I’? That’s something one should clarify before getting to the point of what it should do.

Further, what exactly are the options? What can be done, and what is impossible? This pertains to the world, and what we can know of it: the march of science has continually forged new possibilities, and shown us fundamental impossibilities (moving faster than c, for example).

Finally, we get into normative areas. Given two options, both of which are possible for the sort of thing that ‘I’ am, which one ought I to take? What is right, what is wrong? What are the things that I could do, but shouldn’t/mustn’t?

But that’s just my take on it.

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Someone’s been reading Ayn Rand. A lot.

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I tried to read Ayn Rand once. Once.

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Philosophy is what you have left over, after excluding that which is a) readily apparent (everyone will die) or b) unanimously agreed upon (nobody wants to die), using such axioms as reference points. Not unlike mathematical proofs.

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Let’s be clear about this: that’s exactly what I’m after.

But, weirdly, Kant is just kinda getting it.

-  What can I Know?  That's Epistemology.  Cool, that's one of the Philosophical Inquiries.  

-   What should I do?  That's How should I Live my Life.  Cool, that's one of the Fundamental Questions in the OP. 

-   What may I hope? Frankly, that's How should I live my Life, again. Okay.  Or, arguably, it asks, what can be comsidered Ideal?  But that's just a variation on Plato's Forms.  (Happy to explain)

All good. It doesn’t change my working assumption that all of Philosophy boils down to two questions. Period.

  • External: why is there something instead of nothing?
  • Internal: how should I live my life?

To me, this is a starting assumption I am looking to frame within a larger Philosophical process. Yeah, yeah, “philosophy is the stuff that hasn’t broken off into its own science.” No. Wrong. Missing the point. Philosophy asks these two basic questions. The fact that, in seeking answers, we created whole Sciences, great. Doesn’t change the fuckin’ questions.

Again: this is not new. I am not claiming innovation. This is the fundamental stuff. If you can find a way to break it, knock yourself out. I’m trying to figure out who sums it up this way.

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It seems to me you’re asking for an easy way to sum up a thousands-of-years-long discourse.

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You say that like it’s a bad thing. :wink:

Yeah, I’m not sure what to say. I’m simply a person who is interested in the topic. I’ve read many, many Philosophy for Dummies type books - the comic-book ones have been some of the best! Stating that Philosophy is grounded on those two questions feels like a straightforward observation, not a deep insight. They are literally what I find I am reading about.

Not sure how much I can post during the day. I appreciate everyone’s posting.