We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2019
“What is philosophy?” is a question first raised by Plato when he invented the term and drew a sharp distinction between philosophical inquiry, on the one hand, and Homeric poetry, pre-Socratic natural science, and Sophistic argumentation, on the other. Plato’s definitional answer was that philosophy is the love of wisdom, which meant a search for truth, conducted primarily in the foundational areas of ontology, epistemology, and philosophy of mind, and having important consequences for the axiological fields of ethics, politics, and aesthetics. This answer remained constant throughout the subsequent history of philosophy, despite the important glosses added by Aristotle’s teleology, Descartes’ dualism, Hume’s skepticism, Kant’s idealism, Hegel’s historicism, and Schopenhauer’s voluntarism.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
