Philosophy is a general theory of the whole world, a theory about the place of man in the world. The science of philosophy was formed about 2500 years ago in Eastern countries. This science acquired more developed forms in Ancient Greece.
Philosophy tried to include absolutely all knowledge, since individual sciences cannot give a whole picture of the world. The main question of philosophy - what is the world? This question is revealed in two directions: the philosophical idealism of Plato and the philosophical materialism of Democritus. Philosophy tried to understand and explain not only the world that surrounds a person, but also a person directly. The science of philosophy seeks to generalize the results of the cognitive process to the maximum. She explores the world as a whole, not the world as a whole.
The word "philosophy" in Greek means love of wisdom. The ancient scientist Pythagoras believed that philosophy is wisdom, and a person is drawn to it, loves it. But this concept does not reveal the content.
Going beyond the term, philosophy is a complex, diverse form of human spirituality. It is considered in various aspects. Philosophy dealing with the specific knowledge of mankind about the world helps people to know the world. In some cases, philosophy acts as a religion.
The main issue of philosophy is the question of the relationship between being and thinking, subjective and objective, nature and spirit, physical and mental, ideal and material, consciousness and matter, etc. The main question of philosophy has two sides: what is primary and what is secondary; the cognizable world, or is human thinking capable of cognizing the world in the form in which it is seen in his mind, or how thoughts about the world around a person relate to this world.
Regarding the first side, there were two key areas - materialism and idealism. According to the idea of materialism, the primary basis of consciousness is matter, and consciousness is secondary from matter. Idealists say the opposite. Idealism is also subdivided into objective idealism (spirit, consciousness existed earlier, separately from man - Hegel, Plato) and subjective idealism (the basis is individual human consciousness - Mach, Berkeley, Avenarius). There is something in common between subjective and objective idealism regarding the first direction of the key question of philosophy, which is that they take an idea as a basis.
The philosophers of antiquity also treated the second side ambiguously. Subjective idealism was based on the basic position: the world is not fully cognizable, sensation is the only source of knowledge. According to Hegel, cognizable are the thought of a person, his thinking, spirit and absolute idea. Feuerbach argued that the process of cognition begins precisely with sensations, but sensations do not fully represent the surrounding reality and further the process of cognition occurs through perception.
