PHIL 201THE BRANCHES OF PHILOSOPHY TRANSCRIPTS1:Hello, and welcome to another presentation in Philosophy 201: Philosophy and Contemporary Ideas. In this presentation, I want to introduce you to three major branches of philosophy, and talk about each branch a little bit separately, and then I’ll finish off by talking about some miscellaneous branches of philosophy that are kind of an overlap of those three branches.S2:The first major branch of philosophy is the branch of metaphysics. The word metaphysics means,‘above or beyond physics.’ It investigates questions of reality and existence. But as the word implies, it’s not just simply the existence that we see or the things that we experience with our senses, but what’s beyond those. What’s beyond this real world that we see here? Why does it work the way that it works? Why is it here? How did it get here? Those are some metaphysical areas that we deal with here. We can break metaphysics into four sub-categories here.The first sub-category is cosmological metaphysics, and this deals specifically with the origin and purpose of reality. Why does anything exist at all? That’s often been called the first philosophical question. Why does anything exist? Where did reality come from? How did it develop the way that it was? What is its purpose—why is it here? Those are all cosmological questions.A second area of metaphysics is theological metaphysics, and this deals with the reality of something beyond the natural reality that we experience: the existence of some sort of supernatural. Here it deals with questions, Does God exist? Is there only one God? What is the nature of God—what is he like? How does he relate to reality? Now often times in philosophy courses you’ll study this under the area of philosophy of religion, but they are actually metaphysical questions because they are dealing with the ‘existence’ of a supernatural.A third major area of metaphysics is anthropological metaphysics, and this has to do with the reality of human beings. What does it really mean to be a human being? This deals with the relationship of man to reality. What is man made up of? Are we just a body? Do we have another part of us, an immaterial part of us called a soul or a spirit, a mind maybe? And if we do, how does that mind relate to that body? We’re going to see, when we study metaphysics, that this is going to be a very important area. Is man born moral, or does he develop morality? Is he basically free, or is he in some way or another determined? Those are major areas of anthropology that are metaphysical questions. And we’ll spend quite a bit of time looking at that when we get in to metaphysics.Finally, the fourth area of metaphysics is what’s called ontological metaphysics, and in many ways this is the most abstract and esoteric metaphysics of all. It deals with the nature of being or existence itself. What does it really mean to exist? The question, is reality ultimately one thing, or is reality actually many things that don’t relate together? Is it basically material, immaterial, orboth? Is it fixed and stable, or is it constantly changing? Those are ontological questions that dealwith the whole nature of what does it mean for something to exist. It’s the most abstract area of Page 1 of 4PHIL 201metaphysics. We won’t get too deeply into ontology, but we’ll certainly comment on all of these areas when we study metaphysics.S3:The second major area of philosophy is the area of epistemology, and epistemology deals with knowledge and truth claims. There are a number of questions that are raised in epistemology. Forexample:Can we know anything at all? There is a whole school of thought that says we can’t know anything, called skepticism. We’ll look at that, and we’ll talk a little bit about skepticism in our section on epistemology.How do we know? How does knowledge occur? How do we arrive at the things that we know?Is it possible to have certainty about anything, or is everything just open to debates and we don’t have any certain knowledge at all?Can we trust our senses, are they really reliable? How do you know that what your eyes see is in fact really there? Could you get apart from your mind to check it out? Well, it doesn’t seem you can. Well then how do we know that our senses are really reliable to us or not?Can we know anything apart from our senses? Is it possible to have knowledge about reality that we don’t arrive at through sense experience? That’s called rationalism, and we’ll look at this debate between rationalism and what’s called empiricism which says all knowledge comes from our senses, and talk a little bit about that.How is knowledge justified? When we say we ‘know’ something, what kind of evidence do I need to have in order to prove that? Do I need to have strong evidence, and if so, how much? Is itpossible to say that I know something without any evidence at all? How is knowledge justified?And of course, a very important question: What do we mean when we say that something is truth? What exactly is truth? What does that mean?Those are all epistemological questions and we’ll deal with those in the section on epistemology when we cover that.S4:The third major branch of philosophy is axiology. Axiology has to do with what we consider is of ‘value,’ or what we consider to be ‘good.’ Now we can use this word, good, in two senses.First of all, we can use it in the ethical sense, and that’s a very common way we talk about something. We talk about something being good or bad in the sense of being right or wrong. Ok, that was the right thing to do, or the wrong thing to do; it resulted in something good or it resulted in something bad. And we mean that in a very ethical sense. There’s a lot of questions Page 2 of 4PHIL 201that come up of course in the area of ethics. Probably no other area of philosophy have you already probably done some work and thinking about than you have in ethical thinking. Is there aright and a wrong? Is there really always a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things, or is everything just relative? If there is a right, how do we determine what makes something to be right? Do the consequences have a part to play in it? Or is it something else? Is there some sort of principle involved in that? We’ll spend quite a bit of time talking about this ethics section when we come down further in the course.However, right and wrong, and