Outline summary - Essay Example

Outline Summary According to Aristotle, philosophy starts with wonder about the mysteries and marvels of the world. Philosophy can literally be taken to refer to the love of wisdom, in which the wisdom comes from pursuing knowledge about reality’s most important aspects (Pojman & Vaughn 3). By using intuition, imagination, sense perception, sense, and reason to make arguments and theories that seek to answer pertinent questions about truth. Studying philosophy results in a person possessing a broader vision about life whereby using reason impartially causes one to appreciate the needs, rights, and viewpoints of other people.

Philosophy’s main concept revolves around the construction and analysis of arguments, using ideas to make thesis and counter-thesis. Despite having many similarities to science and actually including psychologists, physicists, and mathematicians and others in the beginning, most of these areas of study have branched out. Today philosophy involves political philosophy, ethics, religious philosophy, logic, epistemology, and metaphysics (Pojman & Vaughn 4). Philosophic inquiry involves “ten commandments” that help one to build their own philosophy and require testing, refining, and possible rejection.

The first one is to allow one’s spirit of wonder to flourish within oneself, while the second holds that every claim one comes across should be doubted until its truth is validated by evidence (Pojman & Vaughn 4). Other commandments include loving the truth, dividing the problems into its essential component, and analyzing each component, building a coherent theory, or argument from each of these component parts, and conjecture and refute by looking for possible counter-arguments against one’s position.

The next commandments are revision and rebuilding one’s beliefs, seeking simpler explanations to problems that seem too complex using the parsimony principle, living the truth, and, finally, living the good (Pojman & Vaughn 5).Philosophy revolves around analyzing and constructing arguments, which is also referred to as logic. This involves the support of a thesis with reasons set forth as assertions that a statement is either false or true (Pojman & Vaughn 33). Reasoning by using premises and coming to a conclusion is referred to as inference.

There are two types of arguments; inductive and deductive. Inductive arguments provide probable support for the conclusions, while deductive arguments provide support for the conclusion that is logically conclusive. The deductive argument that successfully offers logical support for the conclusion is valid, which means that where the premises are held to be true, it is not possible for the conclusions to be false. A deductive argument should, therefore, be valid and possess true premises, following which it is called a sound argument (Pojman & Vaughn 35).

However, it is normally difficult for someone to state an author’s exact premises.Inductive arguments, on the other hand, do not seek to preserve the truth. It cannot guarantee that the truth of the conclusion is tied to that of the premise. It is meant to give conclusions probable support that makes it more likely that the conclusion is true than false (Pojman & Vaughn 37). If the inductive argument succeeds in doing this, it said to be a strong argument, while an inductive argument that does not provide a similar level of support to the conclusion is referred to as weak.

In addition, strong arguments that have true premises are referred to as cogent arguments. Inductive arguments can reason from premises concerning groups and make conclusions about one member of the group and reason from premises concerning a sample in a group to make conclusions about the whole group (Pojman & Vaughn 42).Work CitedPojman, Louis. P. & Vaughn, Lewis. Philosophy: The Quest for Truth. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print.