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If Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind and language. As defined by Wikipedia.

Then if reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind and language were not concepts symbolically and linguistically represented in a way that humans understand in a repetitive pattern.

Can you say that in planet earth philosophy only exists because human exists?

Or is the "actions taken because of the philosophy concept" something deeper that all living creatures have(that we can't understand) as a consequence of survival.

Has human philosophic thought evolved as a consequence of its taken-for-granted free time and if humans still spent most part of the day looking for food would philosophy be affected in quality because of the lack of liberation of worries or do worries increase the quality of philosophic thoughts.

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  • Re "is the "actions taken because of the philosophy concept" something deeper that all living creatures have(that we can't understand) as a consequence of survival", whatever you mean by the "actions taken", we just don't know anything about what abstract things, if any, that other creatures think about. As far as we know no creatures on Earth other than ourselves have a sufficiently rich culture to do philosophy (or engineering, whatever). The chance of such existing is now extremely low, because we know about most all larger kinds of creatures on the planet.
    – Cheers and hth. - Alf
    Commented May 16, 2015 at 2:02
  • SO that those with mediocre science marks can have something to study off course.
    – Neil Meyer
    Commented May 16, 2015 at 16:54
  • Philosophy is a mindset of speculation of the common sense truth.
    – Wiseman
    Commented Dec 26, 2023 at 9:23

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"Can you say that in planet earth philosophy only exists because human exists?": Yes - the problems of modern philosophy, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, political philosophy, etc..., are human specific.

If you resort to older definitions of philosophy, when the natural sciences were considered part of philosophy, then the answer would be different. Questions in physics and mathematics might - emphasis on might - be independent of the human observer, but not questions of philosophy.

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    Excluding topics such as existence and time, seems to me a pretty narrow definition of philosophy. One doesn't have to go to "older definitions" to find works that are concerned with such topics.
    – Cheers and hth. - Alf
    Commented May 16, 2015 at 2:06
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    Those questions from metaphysics which are not "human-centric" are the ones which will most likely migrate towards physics as we learn more. The others are the province of the disciplines I mentioned above, or part of phenomenology - again ultimately about the human way of seeing things, not about the things in themselves.
    – Alexander S King
    Commented May 16, 2015 at 2:12
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    aka natural philosophy
    – Neil Meyer
    Commented May 16, 2015 at 10:17
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There is no universally acclaimed, uncontroversial answer to the question "What is philosophy?" nor to the question of what is the function of philosophy or even whether it has a function at all. This makes it difficult or impossible to objectively answer higher-level questions about philosophy without referencing them to some specific philosophical perspective.

In my personal view, philosophy structures diverse human activities to bring them into alignment, which would make it a human-referenced, and therefore human-dependent activity (although one could arguably imagine something similar being required by any other community of intelligent entities that might exist). This view of philosophy, however, is not widely endorsed.

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If philosophers have trouble determining with absolute certainty that a stone isn't conscious I think they will have even more trouble determining if animals are philosophers. Cats probably are though :)

To clarify, my answer is a response to: Or is the "actions taken because of the philosophy concept" something deeper that all living creatures have(that we can't understand) as a consequence of survival.

My view is that we can't reason about philosophical questions without consciousness. We can't determine if other living creatures are conscious. Hence we can't answer the OPs question.

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  • What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy by Thomas Nagel has some short discussion of conscious stones. I think the answer to your question depends on if you think other animals have human like consciousness.
    – Patrik Gustafsson
    Commented Jun 19, 2015 at 10:06
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    Dogs are conscious. So are cats. Don't know about cows, haven't had much to do with them, although I'm pretty sure that they can be rendered unconscious, which appears to imply that the natural state is conscious.
    – Cheers and hth. - Alf
    Commented Jun 19, 2015 at 12:24
  • @PatrikGustafsson I'm not sure how you're defining conscious to suggest most other mammals are not conscious. Dogs and cats do seem to engage in conscious-end directed activity as Cheers suggests.
    – virmaior
    Commented Jun 21, 2015 at 2:50
  • Well it is a pretty well known problem in philosophy that you don't know if other humans are conscious. You can't look inside their consciousness, you only know that they behave like they are conscious. If we can't know for sure that other humans are conscious, it follows that we can't know if animals are conscious either.
    – Patrik Gustafsson
    Commented Jun 21, 2015 at 20:12

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