Philosophy
This page is one of the explanatory pages for my website, http://www.CardinalKnowledge.org. The website is a work in progress, and each and every part of it is open for discussion. The comments to these explanatory pages are where this discussion is to take place.
Philosophy is one of the four fundamental directions of the human collective knowledge. Unlike science, art, or religion, it is based on pure reason.
What I mean by this is is when a person accepts philosophical knowledge, he agrees with the way it was reasoned. This agreement is acceptance that the entire system of statements or at least its major conclusions are logically correct, within their own framework, that they are correctly derived from postulates, which are often simple truths, the axioms chosen by the philosopher. The force behind the conviction is reason. Western philosophy owes a great deal to Greek rhetors, the masters of verbal persuasion, and the other early thinkers who realized that logical arguments, or at least the arguments that appear reasonable, are a lot more convincing than non-sequiturs.
Of course, one can read the words of Karl Marx or Laozi, and accept their conclusions without ever bothering to follow the reasoning. At best, this makes for a shallow review, at worst this entails belief without evidence, or faith, the unmistakable sign of religion, and some religions evolved from philosophies in that very fashion, such as Buddhism and Taoism.
On the other end of the spectrum, when the concepts of the philosophical discourse and the rules of logic that operates on them are defined with such precision that any person, or even a machine, can follow them and arrive to the same conclusions, regardless of any preconception, philosophy can become what is known as “formal science”, such as formal logic and mathematics, and those are indispensable tools of natural sciences, since they make it possible to manipulate scientific knowledge without personal bias.
Following the immortal eleventh thesis of Karl Marx, “Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kömmt drauf an, sie zu verändern”, for my website I am giving a brief overview of the philosophical systems that had a major impact on the world outside the circles of their followers, which, for the most part, means the philosophical systems employed by governments, popularized by novelists, or taught in schools around the world: confucianism, communism, taoist philosophy, buddhist philosophy, objectivism, and the greek philosophy.