(July 20, 2025 at 3:07 pm)GrandizerII Wrote: Here are some ideas put into practice that came about thanks to philosophy (and that many of us here consider to be good solutions to many of the problems in this world):
- the scientific method
- government
- laws
- democracy
- secularism
- secular humanism
- human rights
- freedom of speech
- freedom of/from religion
- capitalism
- socialist programs
- ethical guidelines
- pacifism
That seems rather simplified.
For example, laws. So we have Trump's Big Beautiful Bill thanks to philosophy.
Or scientific method. There has been several claims who came up with it, but it seems people discovered it after Copernicus and Galileo when they realized that they needed evidence for their claims.
Or human rights. That is rather left to individuals and groups who through history are fighting for their own rights. Like women's rights to education and voting or gays people rights to marriage. Why couldn't people simply see from philosophy books that women need to vote, but they had to be persuaded by protests which were sometimes violent?
Which then also change the ethical guidelines of the society.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"