Philosophy

Philosophy asks the questions that no experiment settles on its own, because they are questions about what an experiment would even mean. Two of its oldest branches sit here. Metaphysics asks what there is: whether the world exists independently of anyone perceiving it, whether minds are made of the same stuff as rocks, what it is for something merely possible to become actual. Epistemology asks how we could know any of it — whether knowledge comes from the senses, from reason, or is out of reach altogether.

The two are not separable in practice. What you take the world to be shapes what you think counts as finding out about it, and the reverse. The dispute between realism and idealism is the clearest case: it reads as a question about reality, and turns almost immediately into a question about the limits of experience.

A note on method, since it is what makes philosophy checkable: the currency here is argument. A position is judged by whether its premises are plausible and its reasoning valid, and the standing objections to each view below are as much a part of it as the view itself.