Philosophy addresses the perennial and fundamental concerns of men and women to understand themselves, their experiences, their relations to others, their inherence in nature and their artistic creations. It does this in a spirit of critical inquiry that demands that individual judgment be developed within a consciousness of our historical philosophical traditions. Like other disciplines, philosophy is an evolving enterprise, though it remains committed to raising final or ultimate questions about the purpose, significance and conditions of human life. It is unique in its sustained and radical commitment to criticize its own historical assumptions about inquiry and truth.
Philosophy is distinctive in another important respect.
Historically, it has articulated ideas about, for example, God, nature, life, society, and justice that disciplines such as theology, physics, biology, sociology, and political science have presupposed as fundamental. Philosophy has therefore both constructed and yet critically challenged and reconstructed the framework of other disciplines. Most importantly, perhaps, philosophy perseveres in raising questions about the meaning, justification and bindingness of normative obligations, whether religious, conventional, moral, ethical or legal. In this task philosophy assumes the crucial role of offering insight and guidance in the practical conduct of individual life within increasingly complex social, national and global circumstances. Until the last two or three hundred years, all branches of human knowledge were considered part of philosophy.