{"content":[{"text":"Introductory Reading \n What is Philosophy? \n When many people hear the term philosophy it calls to mind deep \n thinkers, pondering the nature of the world or the meaning of life. \n Pondering these deep questions is part of it, though philosophy is a very \n general, wide-ranging discipline. So, while it's true that philosophers \n ponder the meaning of existence, they ponder many other things as well, \n like the existence of God, the soul, the nature of the mind, the best way \n to live your life, morality, and more.","bbox":{"left":0.117686,"top":0.088268,"width":0.7585020000000001,"height":0.250639}},{"text":"While it is true that philosophy can get abstract, in my view the best \n philosophers apply the ideas they come up with. The best philosophers \n see a strong relationship between the things they believe, and their \n resulting actions. In some cases, this application may be at the individual \n level (as we will see with Confucius), but in other cases, this application \n may be at the societal level (as we will see with Karl Marx). I hope the \n relationship between ideas and actions will be apparent as we go along \n in the class, though certainly some philosophers are better at applying \n their ideas than others.","bbox":{"left":0.117686,"top":0.353086,"width":0.763309,"height":0.212665}},{"text":"Philosophy translates from Greek as “love of wisdom.” Clearly \n knowledge and wisdom are different things, but using reason to acquire \n knowledge and apply it can lead to the growth of wisdom itself, which is \n what philosophy is all about. But more on knowledge, wisdom, and \n belief later.","bbox":{"left":0.117686,"top":0.579929,"width":0.760291,"height":0.11960999999999988}},{"text":"The Branches of Philosophy \n There are a few general branches to (or categorizations of) philosophy. \n Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, where stuff like language, \n logic, and critical thinking are discussed. Epistemology deals with not \n just spoken and written languages, but with logical languages as well. \n Early work in logical languages played a major role in the computer \n revolution (for example, logical languages like C++ and HTML underlie","bbox":{"left":0.117686,"top":0.714202,"width":0.7593530000000001,"height":0.1834}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}