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

[vulcanlogician]

Excellent article, Grandizer.


@polymath257

I recommend you give it a read. It's quite brief, and it's coming from someone in your field. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blo...hilosophy/

My favorite point:

If your criterion for “being interesting or important” comes down to “is useful to me in my work,” you’re going to be leading a fairly intellectually impoverished existence. Nobody denies that the vast majority of physics gets by perfectly well without any input from philosophy at all. .... But it also gets by without input from biology, and history, and literature. Philosophy is interesting because of its intrinsic interest, not because it’s a handmaiden to physics.

 
I think everyone knows of some piece of literature that they think says something substantial about life. Worst case scenario, philosophy is some kind of weird off-shoot of literature, where the truth-content (and not the meaning) of the "literature" is vigorously debated using logic. I don't see it that way. I see philosophy as its own intrinsic thing. But even if one did deem it some kind of literature off-shoot, so what? That doesn't make it not valuable.

Students have their eyes opened by critically examining these ideas. This is Russell's "food for the mind" argument. In my philosophy of religion class, I used to debate theists. Many of them came to a better understanding of nonbelief after taking the class. And this wasn't just because of our silly "after class" debates over beers. It was because we read material that clarified the arguments, and that sparked better debate on the subject.

But even aside from being food for the mind, I think philosophy has knowledge value. Let's say an ethicist is examining arguments for Divine Command Theory, and comes to realize none of the arguments she's seen is satisfactory. Well, maybe there is some argument "out there" that really makes a case for DCT, unknown to the ethicist -- and so, arguably, no knowledge was gained in her analysis. But yet, I think the ethicist has gained some knowledge by plotting out the negative space and ruling certain things out. Can't we say that a person who has investigated something and ruled out a few possibilities has gained knowledge of a sort?

Finally, let's examine a thinker like Spinoza who posited something like physicalism or materialism WAY before it was cool. Spinoza didn't JUST argue materialism, he followed materialism all the way to the human condition. To Spinoza, the universe behaves according to laws of nature and all of our choices happen because of the laws of nature. All of the emotions we feel are because of the laws of nature. (It's all the universe "happening," if you will, that leads to all our choices and emotional states.) After having painstakingly established this via a series of "proofs," he goes on to do some analysis of what causes certain emotional states, including a theory of what emotions are. THEN, he examines what rational ideas might free us from our bondage to certain negative emotions. All of this thought following directly from the premise that we live in a deterministic universe.

What physicist wants to do THAT? That, by definition, isn't physics. Philosophy isn't trying to be physics, nor is it trying to do something physicists can do better. For an even better example of analysts of the human condition, consider Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. Both grappling with the issue of human suffering in similar ways (both think life is full of suffering and inherently meaningless), but they take two very different approaches when it comes to solutions. Exploring these two thinkers is very much worthwhile.