What is Philosophy?
Author: Peter M.K. Chan
In the simplest of terms, human knowledge comes in two forms: description of facts, and theories about them. Description tells us what happened, theories explain how or why they happened. More importantly, they also purport to tell us what will probably happen. In other words, the purpose of explaining is to make intelligible sense of occurrences that description alone is not able to provide. This is usually done by generalizing and conjecturing on the basis of what is known, so as to project and conceptualize as to what may exist in what is yet to be known. <b>
This explanatory procedure is true of religion as it is of science. Religion conceptualizes the existence of souls and other spiritual beings such as ghosts, deities, devils, angels, if not also fairies and so on, to account for experiences that are either too puzzling or difficult to understand. Science conceptualizes the existence of ether, atoms, material forces, laws of nature, space-time, force-fields, dark-matter, anti-matter, black holes, strange attractors and so on for purpose of understanding the observed workings of the physical world. <b>
In the very basic sense of the word, to philosophize is also to explain. By the light of its founding practitioners, the basic business of philosophy is to determine what exist and the relation between the natures of such existents. These two core enterprises are traditionally known as ontology and metaphysics. Thus, as other kinds of theories, a philosophical theory must also depend on conceptualizations in order to explain. Such conceptualizations are usually erected on the basis of two things: