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Definition of Philosophy

1. Love and pursuit of wisdom by intellectual means and moral self-discipline.


2. Investigation of the nature, causes, or principles of reality, knowledge, or values, based on logical
reasoning rather than empirical methods.
3. A system of thought based on or involving such inquiry: the philosophy of Hume.
4. The critical analysis of fundamental assumptions or beliefs.
5. The disciplines presented in university curriculums of science and the liberal arts, except medicine, law,
and theology.
6. The discipline comprising logic, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and epistemology.
7. A set of ideas or beliefs relating to a particular field or activity; an underlying theory: an original
philosophy of advertising.
8. A system of values by which one lives: has an unusual philosophy of life.

History of Philosophy

 The term, "philosophy," although used universally, is a culturally specific term; it is a European concept embracing
a wide range of human activities of the mind. It's application has varied widely throughout European history, and
its application to non-European cultures is mainly a convenience but does not accurately reflect how non-
European cultures would conceive of or classify these activities.

   The word itself is a Greek word and means "love (philo) of wisdom (sophy)." As a word, it seems to appear in the
fifth century BC, but the great exponents of the term to describe a heterogenous mix of thinking activities are Plato
and Aristotle, the two gigantic figures of Greek philosophy.

   Early Greek philosophy was largely concerned with overarching explanations to explain physical phenomenon.
The earliest Greek "philosophy" was probably a poem by Hesiod called the Theogony  , which concerns the nature
of the gods. The Theogony  largely recounts Greek mythology, but interspersed among the stories are speculations
about the physical nature of the universe.

The early Greek philosophers were primarily concerned with the problem of the "One and the Many." Simply
stated, the problem involves explaining the infinity of things in the universe (the many). We can see that many
separate things can be related to one thing, for instance, there are millions of horses but there is only one concept
of a horse. So the myriad and manifold phenomena of the universe must be reducible to a single, unifying
substance or concept. The early Greeks believed that this single, unifying thing (the One) was some material
substance, like water, or air. Later Greek philosophy would conceive of this one thing as something more abstract,
like number.

So early Greek philosophy was speculative, that is, it wasn't concerned with phenomena and factuality as much as
it was concerned with the reasoning process itself. From the beginning, Greek philosophy was concerned with this
reasoning process, particularly the process of rational demonstration. The truth of a proposition was an aspect of
its demonstration, not its physical reality; a flawless rational demonstration produced certain knowledge. 

   Most of this speculation concerned the nature of the changing, physical world. The early Greek philosophers
were concerned with finding the unchanging principle or substance that lay behind all change and phenomena.
The stable, unchanging component of the universe the Greeks called, physis , so early Greek philosophy was really
a speculativephysics. 

   Eventually, a wide range of activities would be subsumed under the category of philosophy, representing the
entire range of human rational activities. The unifying factor was demonstration, that is, each activity was a
philosophy in that it involved principles of rational demonstration.
What is Logic

The science or art of exact reasoning, or of pure and formal thought, or of the laws
according to which the processes of pure thinking should be conducted; the science of the
formation and application of general notions; the science of generalization, judgment,
classification, reasoning, and systematic arrangement; correct reasoning.  

Scope and limitations

Limitations of logic

Many philosophers are distinctly uneasy<script


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eloquence by a contemporary Harvard University logician, Willard Van Quine, are based on the
claim that relations of synonymy cannot be fully determined by empirical means. Other
apprehensions have to do with the fact that most extensions of first-order logic do not admit of a
complete axiomatization; i.e., their truths cannot all be derived from any finite—or recursive (see
below)—set of axioms. This fact was shown by the important “incompleteness” theorems proved
in 1931 by Kurt Gödel, an Austrian (later, American) logician, and their various consequences
and extensions. (Gödel showed that any consistent axiomatic theory that comprises a certain
amount of elementary arithmetic is incapable of being completely axiomatized.) Higher-order
logics are in this sense incomplete and so are all reasonably powerful systems of set theory.
Although a semantical theory can be built for them, they can scarcely be characterized any
longer as giving actual rules—in any case complete rules—for right reasoning or for valid
argumentation. Because of this shortcoming, several traditional definitions of logic seem to be
inapplicable to these parts of logical studies.

These apprehensions do not arise in the case of modal logic, which may be defined, in the
narrow sense, as the study of logical necessity and possibility; for even quantified modal logic
admits of a complete axiomatization. Other, related problems nevertheless arise in this area. It is
tempting to try to interpret such a notion as logical necessity as a syntactical predicate; i.e., as a
predicate the applicability of which depends only on the form of the sentence claimed to be
necessary—rather like the applicability of formal rules of proof. It has been shown, however, by
Richard Montague, an American logician, that this cannot be done for the usual systems of
modal logic.

Importance of Logic

Logic and Reasoning in Our Daily Lives


Generally, our decision making involves the mind (or the brain) sensory mechanism, perception, cognition
and the expression of results. We often will feel, perceive, think, remember and reason in an adaptive
conscious

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