Metaphysics is First Philosophy | For the Love of Wisdom entry 3
The 3rd entry in my ever deepening digital intro to philosophy text book
Welcome to the third entry of For the Love of Wisdom: An Ever-Deepening Introduction to Philosophy. This is my digital, dynamic introduction to philosophy. I’m calling it ‘dynamic’ because you’ll be able to interact with the posts, leave feedback, ask clarifying questions, and shape the form and content of future entries through your feedback.
I’ve been studying philosophy for a long time and in this series I’m going to introduce you to the field and eventually drag you into the deep-end. It’s going to be great!
In the first installment I discussed my pedagogy and gave a cursory/stipulative working definition of philosophy to help us get going. Here it is:
Philosophy =def. a branch of human inquiry that attempts to generate, examine, and answer life’s most fundamental questions. Philosophy is demarcated from other disciplines in that it studies the general principles undergirding and connecting the special sciences and it prioritizes reason and argument above other tools of inquiry.
If you haven’t read that installment yet, check it out:
Then, in the second installment, I raised the problem of definition for us and gave some more definitions of philosophy—as well as definitions of ‘definition’. So definitely check that one out as well:
I also added entry 2.1 on the philosophy of religion and the problem of definition, which you can read here:
In this third entry, I’m going to briefly introduce you to the main three branches of philosophy which study thee fundamental aspects of the world: reality, knowledge, and value. Then I’ll catalog the various studied in ‘first philosophy’ or ‘metaphysics’. In the next entry I’ll do the same with the philosophy of knowledge (epistemology), and then I’ll conclude this miniseries with the philosophy of value (value theory).
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If you want to go deeper into philosophy, you may enjoy my “philosophy episodes” playlist of my Parker’s Pensées Podcast.
The Three Branches of Philosophy
As I’ve shown in previous entries, a perfect definition of philosophy is hard to pin down—but then again, most definitions are hard to pin down. It’s a bit easier to describe what philosophers study, however.
Philosophy can be carved up into three main branches: