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

[LadyForCamus]

That can get interesting.  Certain ideas about what philosophy is and isn't would exclude a bunch of eastern philosophy... on account of how there's no application of an identical formal system between them.  Philosophy is not, whatever zhuang zhou was doing with his butterfly dream, for example.

Not that I agree with that statement - but it's something people have given some thought to.

And I think that the term 'philosophy' should exclude physics, chemistry, mathematics, geology, and other sciences.

But I *would* include much of eastern philosophy.

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It sounds like philosophy. 😛

And that is why philosophy has a bad rep.

If it limited itself to asking good questions (which it can and often does do), and pointing out assumptions that may be wrong, then it would be doing a fair amount of good.

But as it is, too many philosophers seem to want to create philosophical systems that they claim to be 'true and correct'. At that point, philosophy becomes useless. Answers are things you don't tend to get out of philosophy.

Maybe I’m way off here, but can we not measure the usefulness of philosophical assumptions and foundations based on the real-world outcomes they produce? Now bear with me, because to say I am not well-read on the subject is a gross understatement. But, can we not look at something like The Five Ways and recognize that modern science is in conflict with many of its philosophical assumptions about reality, and then discard those assumptions as less than useful if truth is our goal? Can we not objectively assess the usefulness of caring about truth in the first place? Can we not measure the value of philosophical ideas like truth and well-being to the health of a society via measurable outcomes related to acting in accordance with those ideas? I get that metaphysics can come across as a bit of navel gazing when you consider the likelihood that we’ll ever arrive at a position that is publishable by a peer-reviewed journal, but I don’t think that necessarily means none of the products of specific philosophical ideas can be testable with respect to a goal.

Hopefully at least some of that makes some sense, lol.