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# Philosophical subdisciplines

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As with any field of academic study, philosophy has a number of subdisciplines. Philosophy in fact seems to have a huge number of subdisciplines, in no small part due to the fact that there tends to be a "philosophy of" nearly everything else that is studied. Arguably, the "central disciplines" of philosophy would include logic, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology, [philosophy of science]?, ethics, and political philosophy.

- Aesthetics?: the study of basic philosophical questions about art and beauty?.
- Epistemology: the study of knowledge, its nature, possibility, and justification?.
- Ethics: the study of what makes actions right or wrong, and of how theories of [right action]? can be applied to special moral problems. Subdisciplines include meta-ethics, value theory, theory of conduct, and applied ethics.
- History of philosophy: the study of what dead philosophers have written, its interpretation, and who influenced whom.
- Logic: the study of the standards of correct argumentation.
- Meta-philosophy: the study of philosophical method and the goals of philosophy.
- Metaphysics: the study of the most basic categories? of things, such as existence, objects, properties, causality?, and so forth.
- [Philosophy of biology]?: the philosophical study of some basic concepts of biology, including the notion of a species?.
- [Philosophy of education]?: the study of the purpose and most basic methods of education or learning.
- Philosophy of language: the study of the concepts of meaning and truth.
- Philosophy of mind: the study of the nature of the mind, and its relation to the body and the rest of the world.
- Philosophy of perception: the philosophical study of topics related to perception, especially the question what the "immediate objects" of perception are.
- [Philosophy of physics]?: the philosophical study of some basic concepts of physics, including space, time, and force.
- Philosophy of psychology: the study of some fundamental questions about the methods and concepts of psychology and psychiatry, such as the meaningfulness of Freudian concepts; this is sometimes treated as including philosophy of mind.
- Philosophy of religion: the study of the meaning of the concept of God and of the rationality of belief in the existence of God.
- [Philosophy of science]?: includes not only, as subdisciplines, the "philosophies of" the special sciences (i.e., physics, biology, etc.), but also questions about induction, scientific method, scientific progress, etc.
- [Philosophy of social sciences]?: the philosophical study of some basic concepts, methods, and presuppositions of social sciences such as sociology and economics.
- Political philosophy: the study of basic topics concerning government, including the purpose of [the state]?, political justice?, [political freedom]?, the nature of law, and [the justification of punishment]?.

There are quite a few others; feel free to complete the list, but keep it consistent with the list on philosophy.

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Last edited June 23, 2001 10:11 am (diff)
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