Nutshell Knowledge

A Quick Foreword

By Timothy Ka

There are hundreds of varying disciplines across all of academia, with each playing its own pivotal role to enhance humanity's body of knowledge. In these seemingly disconnected areas of focus, one striking similarity remains: a fuel of curiosity to apply reason for unexplained phenomenon. Academics are therefore like small children, trying to find answers to the millions of questions, one at a time.

It is perfectly reasonable then to ask, could there be one question that explains it all? This is what we label as 'philosophy', which I intentionally avoid in the title for scaring people away, but really it is just a name for the search of knowledge and what I consider as the parent node of all other subjects. In the modern times, it is usually split into 4 major fields: logic, epistemology, ethics and metaphysics.

One issue that I have with the 'modern' philosophy approach is its overemphasis of argument with the lack of any empirical evidence. This only leads to futile debates where there could not be an definite answer, and a popular image of philosophers being armchair professors who waste their daylights pondering on thoughts which cannot be proven true.

I will argue what really is philosophy is maths, physics and art, as well as the consequences from it. Maths is formalised logic, physics is evidence based truth and art is the study of aesthetics which leads to ethics. On the topic of epistemology, I would also argue that neuroscience has a major role.

My approach is therefore starting from these tangible topics which have roots into reality before exploring its consequences. That should be what is philosophy, not the subject which you study at GCSE or A-Level or even at undergraduate, as you do not have enough knowledge of sciences and mathematical logic that forms the foundation for these discussions. I hope that here I could lay some foundation through a fluent walkthrough of each subject's basics to provide an easy resource for systematically learning that I cannot find online.