RE: How worthless is Philosophy?
November 14, 2023 at 7:51 pm
(This post was last modified: November 14, 2023 at 7:54 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
Required...maybe not. You don't need to be an aeronautical engineer to be a pilot. There's at least one philosophy, at least one methodology, to every fact-making subject matter..though. Useful? Yes. It's the study of thinking, and no matter what we happen to be thinking about...well.
A public defender does not need to know the legal philosophy underpinning the relevant laws. As far as I've been told, it's actually a pretty bad idea in a bench or jury trial to hang your case on a philosophy lesson. Either every t was crossed and every I dotted, or they were not. It doesn't matter why.
I think the trouble with ethics 101 and logic 101 -as we do it- is that it often amounts to cultural (or at least cognitive and semantic) normativism. The point, we imagine, is to broaden horizons and possibilities - but how we can do so by reciting the central assertions of our traditions is beyond me. So we decide we need to teach people ethics..whatever specific crisis we're responding to in that notion colors how we teach ethics. This has absolutely plagued western post modernism.
(my daughter got back from one of those three day mock government at the captial things today. I heard all of her (extremely limited) education in philosophy at play as she explained her single issue vote on two subjects - one for one against. She felt proud and she got noticed, so it's useful at least for that...philosophy is probably even at least part of why she's here to tell me the story)
A public defender does not need to know the legal philosophy underpinning the relevant laws. As far as I've been told, it's actually a pretty bad idea in a bench or jury trial to hang your case on a philosophy lesson. Either every t was crossed and every I dotted, or they were not. It doesn't matter why.
I think the trouble with ethics 101 and logic 101 -as we do it- is that it often amounts to cultural (or at least cognitive and semantic) normativism. The point, we imagine, is to broaden horizons and possibilities - but how we can do so by reciting the central assertions of our traditions is beyond me. So we decide we need to teach people ethics..whatever specific crisis we're responding to in that notion colors how we teach ethics. This has absolutely plagued western post modernism.
(my daughter got back from one of those three day mock government at the captial things today. I heard all of her (extremely limited) education in philosophy at play as she explained her single issue vote on two subjects - one for one against. She felt proud and she got noticed, so it's useful at least for that...philosophy is probably even at least part of why she's here to tell me the story)
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