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

[Belacqua]

I've been meaning to read Dante. A close friend of mine, who is very intelligent and also not religious at all, is infatuated with The Divine Comedy. 

That's not to say I'll necessarily share her enthusiasm for the work. But if she likes it, it can't be horrible. I need to find a reputable translation. Hopefully in the public domain. But I'll bust out my wallet if the public domain translations suck.

John Ciardi's translation is very readable. He was a poet before he was a translator, so the language is nicely lyrical. It has a fair balance between poetic sound and meaning, and nothing unreasonable added or changed to fit the translator's language. Also the notes, while not voluminous, are solidly helpful. 

This is what we used in my undergrad days.



The Durling translation is quite good, too, with good notes that are maybe more up to date than Ciardi's. This is what I assigned when my group read it.




Singleton's dual-language editions with commentaries in separate volumes are the scholarly gold standard. Necessary for anything puzzling in less academic versions, or if you're going to write a paper. The language aims for strict literal accuracy, rather than beauty.




Harold Bloom, literature professor at Yale (and a Gnostic Jew) said "Take Dante for your textbook," and "Shakespeare and Dante divide the world between them. There is no third."

Doré's engraved illustrations are helpful in understanding what's going on, but are not artistically brilliant. 



Botticelli had a crisis of faith in middle age and devoted most of the last half of his life to illustrating Dante, a project he didn't live long enough to finish. What he did accomplish is artistically wonderful, as well as accurate to the text in every way. There are books of the full set, but these are pricey.

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Multiple links removed.

William Blake made a set of illustrations as well, but these were intentionally changed and adjusted by Blake in order to "correct" Dante's theology.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Categ...ine_Comedy

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can we not measure the usefulness of philosophical assumptions and foundations based on the real-world outcomes they produce?

I think we can. But I wouldn't want simply to assume that a thing is good if it's useful and bad if it's not. 

Unless we are willing to allow such statements as "it was useful because it made me happy to learn it." or "It was useful to me in understanding how much bigger the world is than I had previously known."

Just as there are paintings that are good simply because they're good to look at, and music that's good just because it's good to listen to, there may be ideas or arguments that are good simply because it's good to think them.