Types of philosophy and main currents of thought

A classification of currents of thought to better understand the development of ideas.

Philosophy is a difficult thing to defineso it is also very complicated to classify the different types of philosophical currents. philosophical currents that exist. However, it is not an impossible task

Below you can see the main types of philosophy you can see the main types of philosophy and ways of thinking that have driven the work of many of the that have driven the work of many of humanity's most important thinking minds. Although they do not serve to fully describe the work of philosophers, it helps to understand the ideas from which they have started and the purposes they pursued.

Types of philosophy according to its content

Philosophy can be classified according to its branchesthat is to say, from the questions and problems that are approached from it. In this sense, the classification is as follows:

1. Moral philosophy

Moral philosophy examines the problem of what is good and evil. what is good and evil and what kind of actions are considered good and evil, and also reflects on whether there is a single criterion for determining the latter. It is a type of philosophy concerned with the direction our lives should take, whether in a general sense (disregarding one's personal characteristics) or more individually (differentiating according to different types of individuals).

For example, Aristotle was one of the most prominent moral philosophers, and he opposed the moral relativism of the Sophists because he did believe that good and evil were absolute principles.

2. Ontology

Ontology is the branch of philosophy that is responsible for answering the question: What exists and in what way does it exist? For example, Plato believed that the material world of what we can see, touch and hear exists only as a shadow of another world above it, the world of ideas.

This is not a branch of philosophy so much concerned with morality as with what, beyond good and evil, exists and shapes reality.

3. Epistemology

Epistemology is the part of philosophy concerned with examining what it is that we can come to know. what it is that we can come to know and in what way we can know it. It is a very important philosophical branch for the philosophy of science, which is in charge of checking that the statements that are based on scientific research are substantiated, in addition to the methods of scientific research itself.

However, philosophy of science is not the same as epistemology. In fact, the former focuses on systems of knowledge that appear through scientific methods, while epistemology deals with all processes of knowledge extraction in general, whether scientific or not.

Types of philosophy according to their description of reality

Different kinds of philosophers think about reality differently: some are monistic and some are dualistic.

Dualistic philosophy

In dualistic philosophy, the ideas and consciousness of the human mind are considered to be part of one reality. human mind are part of a reality independent of the material world. the material world. That is, there is a spiritual plane that does not depend on the physical world. The philosopher René Descartes is an example of a dualistic philosopher, although he also recognized a third fundamental substance: that of the divine.

Monistic philosophy

Monistic philosophers believe that all of reality is made up of a single substance. Thomas Hobbes, for example, expressed this idea through the statement that man is a machine, implying that even mental processes are the result of the interaction between components of the material.

However, monism does not have to be materialistic and consider that everything that exists is matter. For example, George Berkeley was an idealistic monist, since he considered that everything is formed by the divided component of the Christian god.

In any case, in practice, monism has been historically very has historically been closely related to mechanicism and to materialism in general, since it is a way of thinking that is in general, since it is a way of cornering questions that many thinkers believed to be too abstract and insignificant for being pure metaphysics.

Types of philosophy according to their emphasis on ideas

Historically, certain philosophers have emphasized the importance of ideas over the influence of the material context. the influence of material contextwhile others have shown the opposite tendency.

1. Idealistic philosophy

Idealistic philosophers believe that changes of what happens in reality appear in the minds of people, and then spread by modifying the material environment.and then spread by modifying the material environment. PlatoPlato, for example, was an idealist philosopher, because he believed that intellectual labors appear in the mind "remembering" absolute truths that are in the world of ideas.

2. Materialistic philosophy

Materialist philosophy emphasizes the role of the material and objective and objective context in explaining the emergence of new ways of thinking. For example, Karl Marx asserted that ideas are the fruit of the historical context in which they are born and of the stage of technological progress associated with it, and B. F. Skinner accused idealists of being "creationists of the mind" by thinking that ideas are born spontaneously independently of the context in which individuals live.

Types of philosophy according to their conception of knowledge

Historically, two blocks have stood out in this context: rationalist philosophers and empiricist philosophers..

Rationalist philosophy

For the rationalists, there are truths to which the human mind has access independently of what it can learn about the environment, and these truths allow knowledge to be constructed from them. Again, René Descartes is an example in this case, because he believed that we gain knowledge by by "remembering" truths that are already built into our minds and are self-evident, such as mathematical truths.

In a certain sense, researchers such as Steven Pinker or Noam Chomsky, who have defended the idea that human beings have innate ways of managing information that comes to us from outside, could be seen as defenders of some of these ideas.

2. Empiricist philosophy

The empiricists denied the existence of innate knowledge in human beings, and believed that everything we know about the world arises through interaction with our environment. David Hume was a radical empiricist, holding that there are no absolute truths beyond the beliefs and assumptions that we have learned and that are useful to us without necessarily being true.