Structure and subject of philosophy

The birth of philosophy as a science occurred back in the ancient centuries, it was then in Greece that the idea first arose that the totality of all knowledge about nature and the world can be ordered into a single whole conglomerate from which later it will be possible to single out some of the most important axioms and principles. Then you can consistently, step by step, you can justify all the remaining knowledge so that they all together will represent a single whole system.

For the first time the subject of philosophy is in demand in the school of Stoics and the Academy of Plato, here it consists of three parts - physics, logic and ethics. Modern physics is only one of the few natural sciences, while Greek physics represented all scientific knowledge about nature in general and its individual elements: cosmos, fire, water, minerals, plants and animals. The Greek classification treated physics as a science that exists in itself. Ethics represented the science of human behavior, his character, deeds, and generally about any aspects related to people's activities, but the basic concept of this teaching was virtue. Logic is the ability to reason and speak, the ability to express actions and things in words.

Thus, the subject of philosophy included three separate sciences and three basic philosophical problems corresponding to the three spheres of the real world - nature, society, thinking. Many years later, the greatest scientist - the philosopher Hegel declared that philosophy was divided and would always be divided into three main aspects - logic, philosophy of nature and philosophy of the spirit. However, already in the first century before the birth of Christ, the fourth philosophical direction was added to the three philosophical directions, which described the first principles of all things or the divine nature of the whole world. Thus, the subject of philosophy was supplemented by another significant term, which acquired the name of metaphysics.

From the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, profound changes in science took place, in connection with the emergence of experimental-mathematical physics, which inevitably affected the worldview of people and actually the very subject of philosophy. The structure of philosophical knowledge began to include the search for new methods of reliable teachings in the field of methodology and theory of knowledge. The founders of the new philosophy are considered to be Descartes and Bacon, who shares the main types of knowledge according to the peculiarities of the human soul, otherwise called abilities. In turn, Descartes proposed a general picture of philosophy in the form of a tree where the roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and branches are all other sciences that originate from philosophy - medicine, ethics, mechanics. Thus, metaphysics is considered even more reliable and fundamental science than mathematics, but they all serve in the end, the goals that ethics offers.

Until the 18th century there was practically no difference between the concepts "science" and "philosophy", the subject of philosophy assumed the development of quite specific scientific knowledge. The greatest physicist and mathematician of the time, Newton considered himself a true philosopher, and Carl Linnaeus called his work "The Philosophy of Botany." The structure and subject of philosophy is still based on four basic principles: ontology - the science of being, epistemology - the science of knowledge, ethics - the doctrine of the good, and the doctrine of their absolute unity - metaphysics. Despite the fact that the structure and the subject of philosophy have changed throughout its existence, each of the philosophical doctrines has its own internal logic and its own unique direction. It is these aspects that make the subject of philosophy not only important for understanding, but also very interesting for studying and understanding the general picture of the world, as well as its place in this world.