BASIC APPROACHES TO PHILOSOPHY

 Philosophy is that study which tries to answer the biggest questions in life.  Why is there something rather than nothing?  Is death the end?  What is truth?  Etc.  There are no absolute answers to this type of question, because the questions must be answered out of the particular world-view of the questioner.  Let's take an example of this:

 A child runs out into the street and is struck and killed by a car.  The mother, overcome with grief asks "Why must my child die?"  This is an impossibly difficult question.   People gathered around try to help her by suggesting answers.  A physicist might explain that the child weighed 30 lbs and traveled in x-y trajectory at 5mph.   That trajectory was intersected by a 3000 lb car moving at 25 mph.  A Buddhist monk might explain that life is brief, passing, so the mother will find peace only in acceptance.  A Christian might say that it was God"s will, suggesting that the accident makes sense, even though we do not understand it.  Etc.

Here we have several different approaches to the same question.  It is not an issue of one answer being correct and the others false.  Each answer is correct from within a particular approach to answering very difficult questions.

 If we try to classify these (and other) different approaches we notice a startling difference between them.   Faced with a problem, some people are perfectly happy with an explanation which makes sense in physical terms–a scientist for example.  Others want to know what can be done to make life better.  We might call this great difference between approaches Contemplative and Activist.  A contemplative is a person who, faced with a problem, wants to UNDERSTAND it, confident that if the problem is understood, it will be solvable.  A meteorologist, for example, faced with a famine in a certain area, might try to understand the weather patterns which brought about the lack of food.  An activist might take a more direct approach: TAKE ACTION to solve the problem.  For example, send food.

 These two approaches, Contemplative and Activist, are all- inclusive: each person falls under one approach or the other–or a combination of the two.  Which approach would you expect a scientist to rely upon?  Which would you expect a military person to rely upon?

 Now if we understand these approaches, we can use them to classify in a broad way,  the basic approaches which have been employed by philosophers both East and West.  Contemplative approaches are Synoptic, Analytic, or Holist.  Activist approaches are Pragmatic or Existential.
Here is the way them might look in an illustration: