The Importance Of Western Philosophy

Western Philosophy refers to the philosophical thinking in the western culture. Derived from the ancient Greek language, philosophy literally means the love of wisdom. Many Western philosophers are responsible for the intellectual development of mathematics, science, politics and even art. Western philosophers attempt to understand and examine a wide spectrum of issues, such as the universe, human social responsibilities, consciousness or even religion.

Philosophy is commonly divided into six branches:

Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics, Aesthetics, Logic and Political.

The key figure responsible for transforming Greek Philosophy into a unified Philosophical project was Socrates. Through Socrates live dialogues, he studied important concepts

The first reality is the world that we live in. The second reality is a non-physical world in which perfect forms exist. Our entire world is a copy of the perfect forms. So if there are three cats, one is brown one is black and the other is ginger, there must be a perfect cat in the non-physical world off of which those cats were copied off. Aristotle believed in the Law of Identity, which suggests that to exist, something has to have an identity. If something did not exist as something holistically, it would simply not exist. The great Philosopher Aristotle separated his metaphysics into three sections: Natural Theology, Ontology and Cosmology. Ontology is a study that attempts to understand why things exist whereas Cosmology seeks understanding of the universe and its origins, composition etc. Pre-Socratic thinkers began the philosophical quest for a greater understanding of Cosmology. Natural theology studies and argues the existence of God; it questions the existence of divine entities and

“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance”. Socrates stated that people will instinctively do what is good, if they know what is right - stating that morality is only effective if society is enlightened through knowledge. Which raises further questions such as “what is knowledge, how do we know what we know, are we justified in knowing what we know?” Plato and Aristotle dedicated a lot of their time to a field of Philosophy: Epistemology.

Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. It tackles issues of production of knowledge and scepticism. It essentially deals with problems associated to circulation and creation of knowledge. According to Plato, in his book “The Republic”, knowledge is the relationship between truth, belief, and justification. Knowledge is understanding and awareness of pieces of reality.

So for something to be known, the following three factors are needed:

Truth - Aristotle expressed that “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.” Because false premise cannot be known – for something to be seen as knowledge, it has to be