Branches of Philosophy

What is beauty? What is knowledge? What makes an action right? Philosophy is not only the study of great thinkers; it is also organized into distinct fields, each asking its own kind of question.

This series takes up philosophy branch by branch: metaphysics and the nature of reality, epistemology and the limits of knowledge, ethics and the grounds of right action, aesthetics and the sources of beauty, logic and the structure of valid reasoning, and the applied fields (political philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of science) where these questions meet the world as it actually is. Each volume introduces one field clearly and rigorously, tracing how its central debates developed and why they still matter.