Value Of Philosophy Essay, Research Paper

What is the value of Philosophy?

The word? doctrine? is derived from two ancient Grecian words, ? philos? significance? love of? and? sophia? intending? wisdom? . Philosophers are lovers of wisdom. They have had the clip and resources to sit back and inquire about what things truly are like when all the pieces are fitted into one concluding accounting.

The history of doctrine is by and large divided into four phases or periods.

Ancient doctrine covers Greek and Roman doctrine.

Medieval doctrine trades with the great efforts by Christian, Jewish, and Arab minds to synthesise their spiritual religions with Greek and Roman doctrine.

Modern doctrine includes the assorted philosophical efforts in the 17th and 18th centuries to respond to the scientific revolution which took topographic point during the seventeenth century. It culminates in the philosophical system created the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant.

Recent doctrine covers the 19th and twentieth century philosophical motions which have developed in reaction to Kant? s doctrine.

? Practical? people frequently dismiss doctrine because they see it as vague and unsure. One of the those people was Bertrand Russell ( 1872-1910 ) who made a major part to the development of logical positivism, a strong philosophical motion of the 1930s and 1940s.

Russell, British philosopher, mathematician, and Nobel Laureate, whose accent on logical analysis influenced the class of 20th-cneture doctrine. He, the grandson of Lord John Russell, a premier curate under Queen Victoria, was born in Wales. He studied mathematics and doctrine at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1890 to 1894.

He was a chap at three from 1895 to 1901, and a lector in doctrine at that place from 1901 to 1916. Russell was dismissed from his place because of his pocifist activities and subsequently was sentenced to six months in prison because of an allegedly calumniatory article in which he expressed his resistance to World War I and his desire for peace.

Russell was a leader in the resurgence of the doctrine of empiricist philosophy in the big field of epistemology. He wrote Our Knowledge of the External World ( 1914 ) , The Analysis of Matter ( 1927 ) and Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits ( 1948 ) . He besides wrote Principles of mathematics ( 1903 ) , Principia Mathematica ( with A.N. Whitehead ; three volumes, 1910? 1913 ) , and Introduction to mathematical Philosophy ( 1919 ) .

Russell agrees that doctrine trades with issues with unsure replies. Yet in this uncertainness, he sees doctrine? s head value? that in contemplating the great inquiries one is freed from narrow personal involvement entirely.

Let? s reexamine the jobs of doctrine, and so do decision, what is the value of doctrine.

In position of the fact that many work forces, under the influence of scientific discipline or of practical personal businesss, are inclined to doubt whether doctrine is anything better than guiltless but useless dalliance, hair-splitting differentiations and contentions on affairs conc

erning which knowledge s impossible.

This position of doctrine appears to ensue, partially from a incorrect construct of the terminals of life, partially from a construct of the sort of goods which philosophy strives to accomplish.

Doctrine, like all other surveies, purposes chiefly at cognition. The cognition it aims at is the sort of cognition which gives integrity and system to the organic structure of the scientific discipline, and the sort which consequences from a critical scrutiny of the evidences of our strong beliefs, biass, and beliefs. But it can non be maintained that doctrine has had any great step of success in its efforts to supply definite answer to its inquiries.

Uncertainty of doctrine is more evident than existent: those inquiries which are already capable of definite replies are placed in the scientific disciplines, while those lone to which, at present, no definite reply can be given, remain to organize the residue which is called doctrine.

There are many inquiries? and among them those that are of the profoundest involvement to our religious life? which, so far as we can see, must stay indissoluble to the human mind unless its powers become of rather a different order from what they are now.

The value of doctrine is to be sought mostly in its really uncertainness.

Doctrine is able to propose many possibilities which enlarge our ideas and free them from the dictatorship of usage. Philosophy has a value? possibly its head value? through the illustriousness of the objects which it contemplates, and the freedom from narrow and personal purposes ensuing from this contemplation.

The head which has become accustomed to the freedom and nonpartisanship of philosophic contemplation will continue something of the same emotion. Doctrine is the ageless hunt for truth, a hunt which necessarily fails and yet is ne’er defeated ; which continually eludes us, but which ever guides us ( William James ) .

Doctrine helps people to take at developing rational accomplishments, to take at groking what they are reading to develop themselves to listen and to hear what philosophers have to state, to develop themselves to critically measure what they are reading, to seek to state something original on one of the frontier issues in doctrine, and to seek their ain manus at building a comprehensive doctrine.

Doctrine is to be studied, non for the interest of any definite replies to its inquiries, since no definite replies can, as regulation, be known to be true, but instead for the interest of the inquiries themselves ;

Because these inquiries enlarge our construct of what possible enrich our rational imaginativeness, and decrease the dogmatic confidence which closes the head against guess ; but above all because, through the illustriousness of the existence which doctrine contemplates, the head besides is rendered great, and becomes capable of that brotherhood with the existence which constitutes its highest good.

James A. Gould, Classic Philosophical Questions

Henry L. Ruf, Investigating Philosophy

Eugene Kelly / Luis E. Navia, The Fundamental Questions