Philosophy and the Categories of Experience

Abstract

Philosophy, in its broadest and least technical sense, is a world-view—a way of looking at the world; and the way that one looks at the world depends on the categories by means of which he approaches, classifies and interprets it. For example, a religious philosophy classifies what it finds under religious categories. A scientific philosophy holds that various sorts of natural phenomena, their processes, relationships, and the regularities to be discovered therein are fundamental. A materialistic philosophy seeks to classify all experience as the appearances and interactions of matter; and so on.