ABSTRACT
What makes a human different from other living things? Are we really free to choose different actions? What is the good life for humans? These are philosophical questions. One can try to answer them using facts known from biology, or psychology, or literature, but the attempts to answer them usually involve philosophy. Isaiah Berlin has described philosophy as dealing with those questions for which there is no clear agreement on where to look for answers. We know how to determine whether a certain drug cures a certain medical condition, or how far it is from Los Angeles to New York, or who won the World Series in 2005. We do not have clear agreement on how to decide whether universities should prepare good workers or informed citizens, or when a cause is worth dying for, or how much freedom individuals should have while living in society. Philosophy is sometimes described as a discipline or a science or a field of knowledge. The Greek origins of the term involve two words meaning friend of or love of wisdom. In the Western intellectual tradition, we have fragments of philosophical writing that date back more than 2,500 years. The first complete writings (as opposed to fragments) that we have are from Plato and Aristotle, Greek philosophers who lived in Athens in the fourth century b.c.1
