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2. The Basic Idea to Understand Philosophy

To understand philosophy, we must first understand how philosophical problems arise, what problems it want to solve, and what goals to achieve. That is to say, we must first find a basic idea for the development of philosophy. The basic idea is that early philosophers tried to use philosophy to solve all problems.

There are general clinics and branch clinics in hospital. The sub-clinics include internal medicine, surgery, paediatrics, gynecology and so on. Similarly, science is branch theories or branch wisdom, including maths, physics, chemistry, biology and so on. But philosophy is general theory, general wisdom, or non-subject theory, non-subject wisdom. A discipline in science only studies the commonalities of certain things. For example, biology only studies the commonalities of living things, anthropology only studies the commonalities of human beings. Or a discipline only studies one aspect of all things. For example, optics studies only the optical properties of all things, acoustics studies only the acoustic properties of all things. But philosophy is the most abstract theory. It deals with the commonality of all things, the commonality of all aspects. “Metaphysics” means more abstract than physics.

More than two thousand years ago, the ancient Greek geometrician Euclid established a huge theoretical system of geometry, which starts from several axioms and deduces a series of theorems, which can solve various problems. Philosophers hope to find the origin first, and then start from the origin to establish a system of theorems from top to bottom as geometry dose. Therefore they can deduce all the necessary conclusions and establish the most complete world outlook to solve all the problems of understanding and reforming the world.

It is not easy to live. There are all kinds of pain and disaster. We must fight with the sky, ground and people to survive and to live a happy life. But these struggles have had their successes and failures, and sometimes the failures have been terrible and bloody.