Three Questions
How do we know? What exists? How should we live?
Every philosophy, and every religion that reflects on itself, gives some answer to three questions. The answers depend on one another. What we think can be known limits what we can claim exists, and both shape what we think we ought to do. Ancient philosophy began with what exists. Modern philosophy, since Descartes, begins with how we know, and this guide follows that order. Kant put the questions as: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?
| Epistemology | How we know, and where knowledge comes from: reason, the senses, experience, or intuition? |
| Ontology | What finally exists: matter, mind, or both? |
| Ethics | How we should live, and what makes an action right or good? |
The next pages show how four thinkers, in the order they lived, answered all three: Plato, Aristotle, Ghazali and Descartes. The three pages after them take each question in turn, and Iqbal’s first chapter begins after them.