World (philosophy)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The world is, in a philosophical sense, everything that makes up reality; similar to the layman's definition of the world or the universe. Although the very concept of world is debatable for some adherents to philosophical worldviews such as followers of solipsism, the vast majority of people agree that we are experiencing an external world of which we form a part.
This concept was first introduced by Hegel and then it was subsequently modified by latter philosophers such as Immanuel Kant or Martin Heidegger, who introduced potentially troublesome concepts such as category or the "ding an sich", which shattered the generally accepted and set version of a static and intelligible world that pervaded the philosopical insight of reality before.
A defining human characteristic is that as beings conscious of our surroundings, we try in one way or another to rationalise the system of experiences and stimuli that we receive, and interpret it according to a variety of beliefs and asumptions. This creates a wide array of interpretations of the world.
It is worth mentioning that the philosophical debate on the definition of the world is far from being settled, and that no general agreement has been reached as to what would be an acceptable and coherent definition of "world". This debate involves a number of philosophical branches such as Epistemology.
Some philosophers argue that metaphysical concepts such as possibility, probability and necessity are best analyzed as referring to different possible worlds, that is, different ways the world could have been; see Possible world.
The world in a philosophical sense might be, to some, a construct of the human interpretations. The world as seen by Heidegger is a place into which human beings are thrown without any specific reason or purpose, and it is constituted by a wide array of objects, such as the physical world that humans didn't create, and objects such as the culture or languages that humans created and that humans can also modify.
For a full understanding of this concept, refer to the links contained herein, and western philosophy in general.
[edit] Cultural references
In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, there are a group of monks who believe the universe is a figment of its own imagination. (See idealism)
