Students are encouraged to express any conclusions that they themselves may have reached concerning foundational questions, but they are also expected to try to understand some of the influential conclusions that others have reached. Furthermore, it is essential that students try to understand what reasons people have had for reaching those conclusions. The following are other areas of study which are central to philosophy. Epistemology is the study of what constitutes knowledge of the world, and of what methods can be used to obtain it. Ethics and aesthetics investigate what it is to make value judgements, and how such judgements can be justified.
Political philosophy investigates the principles which underlie the structure of a good society.
Every human inquiry rests on general assumptions which we take for granted while we pursue more particular goals. At times however, in any discipline, foundational questions arise. Anyone facing such questions, in any discipline, is doing philosophy. Thus for any discipline there is an area of study appropriately described as the philosophy of that discipline. There is the philosophy of history, of psychology, of biology, of science, of law, of mathematics, and so on.