[JonnyBGood]

Philosophy is a horribly poorly defined word. You can find yourselves arguing about entirely different things and not realising it. One of the key questions of philosophy is "what is philosophy?" Rather than define what subject philosophy concerns it's more sensible to indicate which questions philosophy is in response to. Philosophy is a response to questions concerning ultimacy. Questions about causality and about possible first causes. Any response to questions in this area are philosophical. Philosophy is a response to abstract questions. Those things which we recognise but cannot pin down and those whose inner workings are not open to empirical exploration. What is good, beautiful, right or true. Why do things happen. These types of questions are philosophical and any answer to them is philosophical as well. Even the assertion that nothing is good, beautiful, right or true, that there are no first causes and philosophy is meaningless junk is a philosophical assertion itself.

What is out there and in me, what can we know about it, what ways of describing it exist and what should we do about it? That extended question covers the five main disciplines of western philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, logic and aesthetics and finally ethics). Science could be considered to be a systematic response to an epistemological question about the nature of the universe, namely that there is something out there and we can discover what there is by observation and experimentation. ID can be considered to be an unsystematic response to an epistemological question about the nature of the universe, namely that there is something out there and we should make random unrefutable assumptions about it.