Philosophy
A discipline concerned with the critical examination of the rational grounds for our most fundamental beliefs and logical analysis of the basic concepts employed in the expression of such beliefs. Philosophy is perhaps the oldest and most highly regarded of the sciences. It has been a recognized discipline since the days of the ancient Greek philosophers and has evolved over more than 2,500 years based on the questions that have been relevant to society at any given point in time. What were once purely philosophical pursuits have evolved into the modern day specialized fields of psychology, sociology, linguistics, and economics. Philosophical rigor informs all modern sciences, medicine, mathematics, politics and linguistics.
There are four main branches of philosophy: ethics (moral or right living), metaphysics (the essential nature of things), epistemology (what counts as genuine knowledge) and logic (the correct principles of reasoning). Each branch has several sub-classifications. For example, within metaphysics, “ontology” is the inquiry into the meaning of existence itself, and “philosophy of mind” is an inquiry into the nature of the mind, consciousness (awareness), mental functions and properties, and their relationship to the physical body.
The vast body of philosophy is divided into historical time periods and classified by particular schools of thought. A survey of philosophy is well beyond the scope of this summary. However, there are key philosophers whose work on the metaphysics of human consciousness has vast implications for the power of the human mind : Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.