RE: Generally speaking, is philosophy a worthwhile subject of study?
February 12, 2022 at 8:15 am
I should have probably been a bit broader with my reply because before I was generally talking about personal/general/abstract philosophy... which was not a great fit for the OP's actual question of whether it's a worthwhile subject of study.
So as an actual academic subject of study, anyone who succeeds in it has my utmost respect... I tried an open learning course in it recently - granted a long time out of formal education and therefore no longer in that zone so to speak - and I failed miserably. It was just totally overwhelming... so many different perspectives to learn and all with different writing styles/ways of expressing themselves... I just couldn't process it all, couldn't find any reliable way to learn it all, nor any easy way to reduce what they were saying to simple arguments... well, in all cases, some philosophers were easier to parse than others but generally, it was just hard to find a consistent/reliable way to parse them all. So yeah, utmost respect for you guys who can seem to soak all this stuff up like a sponge, extracting the arguments in an instant, regardless of source.
Still perhaps misses the mark of the question... is it worthwhile to study if you can do it? I'd say definitely yes; if well structured and disciplined, philosophical thought/enquiry is essential for extending and evolving our knowledge in a whole range of subjects, some more practical and useful - like ethics - than others.
The 'others'... the more abstract uses of philosophy, such as the issues of self, mind, metaphysics, are more where I think the double-edged sword of it comes in... and why I'd still say 'both' rather than 'yes' - the potential to go down rabbit holes and get bogged down in minutiae, with no necessary guarantee that such boring down to different levels of detail - which ultimately I think is what philosophy is all about - will necessarily resolve the myriad paradoxes we often find ourselves in because of philosophy. As I said earlier, I think we have a somewhat innate optimism towards the value of philosophical thought, and that keeps driving us in those sorts of questions, ever trying to find the right question/right perspective/right level of detail, to make it make sense, to resolve paradoxes, but ultimately I think there's no guarantee that such is always possible with philosophy... due to the limitations of language etc, or what we can actually perceive or conceptualise.
So as an actual academic subject of study, anyone who succeeds in it has my utmost respect... I tried an open learning course in it recently - granted a long time out of formal education and therefore no longer in that zone so to speak - and I failed miserably. It was just totally overwhelming... so many different perspectives to learn and all with different writing styles/ways of expressing themselves... I just couldn't process it all, couldn't find any reliable way to learn it all, nor any easy way to reduce what they were saying to simple arguments... well, in all cases, some philosophers were easier to parse than others but generally, it was just hard to find a consistent/reliable way to parse them all. So yeah, utmost respect for you guys who can seem to soak all this stuff up like a sponge, extracting the arguments in an instant, regardless of source.
Still perhaps misses the mark of the question... is it worthwhile to study if you can do it? I'd say definitely yes; if well structured and disciplined, philosophical thought/enquiry is essential for extending and evolving our knowledge in a whole range of subjects, some more practical and useful - like ethics - than others.
The 'others'... the more abstract uses of philosophy, such as the issues of self, mind, metaphysics, are more where I think the double-edged sword of it comes in... and why I'd still say 'both' rather than 'yes' - the potential to go down rabbit holes and get bogged down in minutiae, with no necessary guarantee that such boring down to different levels of detail - which ultimately I think is what philosophy is all about - will necessarily resolve the myriad paradoxes we often find ourselves in because of philosophy. As I said earlier, I think we have a somewhat innate optimism towards the value of philosophical thought, and that keeps driving us in those sorts of questions, ever trying to find the right question/right perspective/right level of detail, to make it make sense, to resolve paradoxes, but ultimately I think there's no guarantee that such is always possible with philosophy... due to the limitations of language etc, or what we can actually perceive or conceptualise.
