practicality of philosophy today

[massflavour]

i recently finished an intro philosophy course which taught the basics of informal logic, western philosophy, and some eastern.. also the more prominent philosophies which are generally accepted and or debated among philosophers today.

i finished it and wondered if there was any real practical value to it any more.. sure, science was partially the product of philosophy, as with many modern forms of ethics, but does the study really produce anything tangible? science seems to be giving most of the answers nowadays.

i haven't really taken a particular stance on the subject but i'm wondering what other people think...

[Xx{Midnight}xX]

Re: practicality of philosophy today

It has a place, the place you grant it. Science is only a perceived set of answers. We can't answer a basic question of "what is real" or "what is right and wrong" and many other questions along these lines. We can only offer a perception of what we think the answer to be. Science is as flawed as religion is in this regard. The reason science is valued is because it uses the ideals of philosophy to explain things in a perception we can comprehend. Namely the part that if new "evidence" comes along to suggest a change in "fact" it changes with it, or in short, there aren't any actual answers. (This is my understanding of this though.)

You know funny thing is, this was an essay question on my final exam for the Philosophy course I just finished myself. "What is the value of philosophy?" I actually at the time left it blank. I couldn't answer it. I still somewhat feel I can't beyond "whatever place I grant it."

[popsicle_3000]

Re: practicality of philosophy today

even if you might not have any tangible effect (as in debating philosophy w/ others), the process of studying it will have expanded your mind. that in of itself is worthwhile

[dragon890x]

Re: practicality of philosophy today

Philosophy teaches the fundamentals of critical thinking. Those complicated questions are nothing more than a method used in critical thinking. The method's goal is to create a complex question using a simple concept. This allows a thinker to build upon a thought or create a goal (answer the question).

Every question has a simple answer. When you begin to over think, you add complications.

Just like with this question, 'how practical is philosophy today?'.

Well, you used it when creating your post, now didn't you?

[infinity.]

Re: practicality of philosophy today

It has a place, the place you grant it. Science is only a perceived set of answers. We can't answer a basic question of "what is real" or "what is right and wrong" and many other questions along these lines.

yes you can. that's the point of philosophy

[stargroup100]

Re: practicality of philosophy today

yes you can. that's the point of philosophy

lol

I don't have much experience myself with philosophy, but my take is that we use it to challenge our beliefs. Things that we seem to believe are "most obviously true" might need revisions, and these changes could drastically affect some of the problems we face in the real world.

[infinity.]

Re: practicality of philosophy today

lol

I don't have much experience myself with philosophy, but my take is that we use it to challenge our beliefs. Things that we seem to believe are "most obviously true" might need revisions, and these changes could drastically affect some of the problems we face in the real world.

don't comment on something if you don't know anything about it lol

philosophy is a way of analyzing reality and answering fundamental questions that encompass what is (and is not). not just like sitting around and thinking for the sake of being more open minded

and your last sentence is so completely irrelevant and without substance

OP:
philosophy has a lot of relevancy today in regards to academia, but the relationship between academic philosophy papers and legal/judicial/social action is so minimal that philosophy really doesn't play the role it should. the point of most philosophical works is to provide a sort of proof or answer that would apply to cases (action, maxims, behavior, etc) and a lot of it accomplishes that. it's just that they don't really ever get used for much aside from inspiration for those that [actually] read philosophy.

look at peter singer's famine, affluence, and poverty paper; pretty good example

[JJTrixX]

Re: practicality of philosophy today

science doesn't teach you life value

[Xx{Midnight}xX]

Re: practicality of philosophy today

science doesn't teach you life value

That implies it has one

[Choofers]

Re: practicality of philosophy today

dunno science taught me to not take things at face value

[Reincarnate]

Re: practicality of philosophy today

Philosophy is nice in that it can help inform a variety of other frameworks (logic, reason, consistency, meaning, utility, epistemology, etc).

However, it's only useful if you actually give a shit about the truth value of something and apply it accordingly, because a lot of dumb shit gets mixed into it all when you start blurring the lines between things that are necessarily distinct / allowing things like meaning and consistency to be suspended / etc, which is not much more than empty mental masturbation with no climax.

A lot of people use philosophy to compensate for their ignorance/close-mindedness, since you can basically make up/find a philosophical framework that supports anything you want. That's not going to help you if you approach things that way.

[massflavour]

Re: practicality of philosophy today

Well, you used it when creating your post, now didn't you?

HENCE why i stated i didn't have a particular position, just a question. heh.

[ScylaX]

Re: practicality of philosophy today

You know when the first theories on quantum mechanics began to see the light, there was a great debate upon the uncertainty principle and Kant's philosophy (basically the one he developed in Critique of Pure Reason) was used as a tool for the debate because Kant's philosophy treated entirely of the theory of knowledge and thus was a true epistemological help for the debate at the time. (heck I think Kant's philosophy even helped in laws because how it was a great tool to assert what is real and what isn't)

Philosophy is basically a field/domain of thinking that consists essentially on "correctly thinking" and doing that without cutting down the whole field of what is actually thinkable, Science is a consequence of philosophy among a lot of other domains. It's why the object of philosophy is so vast and sometimes unclear for most people. And it's why it takes every single thing existing to our mind in its process of thinking. It's thinking about everything to know what's the best way to think about that, with no exception.
From that I consider that philosophy is essential for anything, may it be Science or Arts, because from the moment you give a definition of what you're doing, you're doing philosophy. From the moment you're trying to be clear about the goal, the means, the ways you're using and so on, you're making philosophy.
That's the sport of the Reason if you consider sport is there to preserve your health.

And that's also why some people as Foucault or Comte stated that you could consider there was a progress in philosophy by looking at its division, its consequences, at where philosophy was "retiring", for instance : linguistics or social sciences, or even psychology. They're all consequences of Philosophy and at the same time, they are "theme of thoughts" that can be qualified today as, and are now essentially "Sciences" more than "philosophical problems". Philosophy is basically the core of epistemology.
Remember that what distinguishes philosophy from science is not any epistemological rigor but the fact that you make experiments that can be verified by your senses, you can't make experiments in philosophy : you only have your mind, somehow. When you're stating something about Art, you can only observe the consequences of Art (great artists, great works of Art, history of Art and so on), there's no way to actually make experiments about how an artist creates while staying in the domain of aesthetics, because that would be a work of psychology. It's why there's no Science of the Arts ; there may be a Science of aesthetics, as some ways to actually discover what is pleasant to our mind and what isn't, but once again that will say nothing conceptual on the Arts, this is a problem that belong to psychology, it will basically say nothing on the core of what is aesthetical and what isn't (I mean, for instance, "how is a work of Philosophy not aesthetical compared to a novel ?"), it will not verify the true core of aesthetics, it will be a description, not a definition : you have to think about it without fleeing from the core-topic.

[ScylaX]

Re: practicality of philosophy today

Philosophy is nice in that it can help inform a variety of other frameworks (logic, reason, consistency, meaning, utility, epistemology, etc).

However, it's only useful if you actually give a shit about the truth value of something and apply it accordingly, because a lot of dumb shit gets mixed into it all when you start blurring the lines between things that are necessarily distinct / allowing things like meaning and consistency to be suspended / etc, which is not much more than empty mental masturbation with no climax.

A lot of people use philosophy to compensate for their ignorance/close-mindedness, since you can basically make up/find a philosophical framework that supports anything you want. That's not going to help you if you approach things that way.

Yeah it's really easy to fake complexity when your phrasing looks like mixing concepts and words together to make it sound "deep" ; it remembers me that phrase of Wittgenstein about the fact that philosophy is about unknotting the knots in our minds, which means that what is important in philosophy is not about saying complicated things but what led you to say such things, anybody can say "You can't prove me there's no hippopotamus in this room", but what is important is what led you to assert something like that, and thus, what will helps you develop - probably - a whole theory from what led you to say that.

Philosophy has to be meaningful.

[Arkuski]

Re: practicality of philosophy today

I took an ancient philosophy course this semester and I learned a ton. Philosophy is more practical today than it has ever been particularly because almost everybody cannot think on their own. It really seems that today people are treated as means to an end rather than as rational agents. People used to attend university purely for the betterment of the soul, and I think no one would agree with that today. I recommend reading Plato and Aristotle.