[Serious] Generally speaking, is philosophy a worthwhile subject of study?

[polymath257]

Philosophy is wonderful to discuss with friends over drinks (Symposium, anyone?) but is rather useless as a source of knowledge.

I don't think philosophy is a very good source of knowledge either. It's a pretty good "source of theories" though. It's a decent source of good questions too. (If you value good questions.)

Where are these philosophical dogmatists you keep referring to? What philosopher says you need to believe something "because they say so"? William Lane Craig? I mean, there's more to philosophy than Craig.

Sometimes, you don't need to do anything but show up to the bar in order to philosophize. But other times, you need to do six and a half hours of reading and try really hard to understand something before the discussion can transpire. Treating the whole of philosophy like some quaint "night out for drinks" is inaccurate.

Well, I can point to Kant who said that Euclidean geometry is synthetic a priori knowledge. Then non-Euclidean geometry came along.

Or Aristotle who claimed that any type of 'motion' (which , in his context meant any change) required a force or a cause. Then Newtonian physics came along where uniform motion is natural and needs no cause.

Or I can point to Aquinas, who spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how angels can move based on Aristotelian physics.

Most of the scholastics saw Aristotelian physics as 'self-evident' even when they were looking at the edges where it failed. Their insistence that Christianity and Aristotle needed to be merged was very productive, but also fundamentally wrong.

I don't even think Craig deserves  to be called a philosopher. He is an apologist and a pretty poor one at that.

I'm not even sure I agree that philosophy is a good source of theories any longer. it was until the rise of science, I agree, but for the last 200 years or so, I have seen no philosophers add to the list of testable theories. Kant's proposal of an 'island universe' (which we know of as our galaxy) was perhaps the last good contribution from a philosopher. Certainly there has been nothing offered since the rise of modern science that has actually impacted science at all.

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Sometimes, you don't need to do anything but show up to the bar in order to philosophize. But other times, you need to do six and a half hours of reading and try really hard to understand something before the discussion can transpire. Treating the whole of philosophy like some quaint "night out for drinks" is inaccurate.

At the beginning of Plato's Symposium they decide they're not going to drink any alcohol that night. 

People should read the books they think they know about.

I'll have to go back and check, but I recall a discussion of how much water and how much wine to mix. The decision was not to 'drink heavily' since many had done that the night before, but to allow each to drink as they were inclined (no forced drinking). So, it was NOT a choice of 'no alcohol', but rather a choice to not drink in excess.

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People seem to have a strange image of what philosophy is.

It's just an attempt to think really clearly about certain subjects. Things that can't be demonstrated by science. When we attempt to think about those things, we are doing philosophy, whether we like it or not.

Thinking clearly is good.

Standard American anti-intellectualism maybe recoils from this. An idea that things have to have some immediate practical aim is just a hold-over from the Protestant morality that dominated America for a long time -- as would be obvious to people if they studied the genealogy of their beliefs.

Since we don't conduct scientific experiments on this forum, much of what we do is philosophy. When you say that philosophy is not worthwhile you are doing philosophy.

Doing it well is not easy, and we are right to respect those few people who manage it.

Clarity of thought is a good thing, but it is frequently disrupted by starting out under the wrong assumptions. It is possible to think logically based on false premises, but all that does is lead to more falsehoods.

Not all thinking is philosophy. And not all thinking about philosophical subjects is clear, or even attempting to be clear. And not all attempts to be clear actually manage clarity of thought.

I agree that America has a nasty tradition of anti-intellectualism. In what other country would a political party proudly be labeled the 'Know Nothing' party?

But part of being intellectual is the willingness to question the assumptions made in the past to see where they are wrong and how they need to be modified. Philosophy, from what I have seen, has not yet adjusted to the rise of Newtonian physics, let alone the rise of modern science. All too often it is stuck in a metaphysics defined by Aristotle and elaborated by Aquinas. Such views no longer match what we KNOW from actually studying the real world. Aristotle himself would have adjusted his views in the face of the new evidence, I believe. A good hint is that any use of the terms 'substance, necessity, accident', or 'natural motion' is likely to be severely outdated.