Philosphy is a waste of time

[Torie]

After a diligent search, I finally found the article that I was looking for to validate my suspicions and prejudices. Eureka!

I have always hated philosophy, first because my IQ is too low to understand it, and second because its practical application to anything to do with my now quite extended life, either in living "the good life," (see I can toss terms around too), or making a living, or a positive difference, or in love, I found found to be basically the null set. Philistines of the world unite!

https://faculty.fiu.edu/~harrisk/Paper%20Assignments/Articles/Philosophy%20is%20a%20waste%20of%20time.htm

[Antonio the Sixth]

I am absolutely distraught by how much I agree with this. I have had a deep love for philosophy ever since I was a child. I continue to believe that philosophical thinking is one of the most profound, beautiful and important activities that a human being can engage in. And yet, the ways in which academic philosophers treat the discipline is anything but profound, beautiful and important. Some of the arguments that they put forward make a mockery of the very notion of rational inquiry, and amount to little more than language games. When you find yourself arguing with a straight face that the sky is not blue, it might be time to take a good look at yourself and wonder if there is any value to what you're doing.

In short, philosophy must be rescued from philosophers.

[Torie]

Bless you, you most erudite one you.

[afleitch]

Agree one hundred percent.

I'll regurgitate last year's concern rant

I think it depends.

Despite heavy philosophising myself (at least I think) I generally don't like philosophy. As much as Judith Butler is a bit of meme, I can understand her, through my own self editing of what she says as opposed to say Jordan Peterson who just talks absolute bollocks. And people mistaking absolute bollocks for wisdom or intelligence is as bad, if not worse than 'Pez' philosophy as the latter doesn't pretend to be anything greater than it is.

But likewise people mistaking genuine complexity for absolute bollocks because they can't understand it or just want to discredit it (as is happening with Butler recently on THAT ISSUE) is just laziness and at times malice on their part.

I have a real visceral dislike of 'thought experiment' secular ethical philosophy; trolley problems or 'imagine you woke up attached to another person' etc. If you have to construct an almost impossible set of conditions in which to play, then what you're postulating is effectively worthless. All of us, no matter when or where we are tend to face variations of the same ethical and philosophical problems as the next person and otherwise complex philosophical exercises are best served by bearing that in mind.

I think what you say about 'lucidity' is true, but one persons inspirational advocate is another persons obvious fraud. So there always has to exist, for example, both Kant and Kantianism, as distinct theatres. You aren't served better by grasping Kant directly or by espousing a more accessible interpretation. Hume's treatise are relatively easy to understand now, in comparison to a lot of his contemporaries but he had to re-write them and often add unnecessary complications to them for the palette of his own audience.

As long as everyone doesn't talk across each other, I think better conversations can be had by people with different levels of engagement.

[°Leprechaun]

Literally philosophy is the love of wisdom, so why would anyone not want wisdom?

Science uses tools to find truth:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_cat_analogy

Using a cat analogy, brings to mind another metaphor:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat

Is it true that the unexamined life is not worth living?

To put it another way is it worthwhile to search for answers about the nature of reality, being, existence and life itself?

..or is such a search futile?

[Antonio the Sixth]

Agree one hundred percent.

I'll regurgitate last year's concern rant

I think it depends.

Despite heavy philosophising myself (at least I think) I generally don't like philosophy. As much as Judith Butler is a bit of meme, I can understand her, through my own self editing of what she says as opposed to say Jordan Peterson who just talks absolute bollocks. And people mistaking absolute bollocks for wisdom or intelligence is as bad, if not worse than 'Pez' philosophy as the latter doesn't pretend to be anything greater than it is.

But likewise people mistaking genuine complexity for absolute bollocks because they can't understand it or just want to discredit it (as is happening with Butler recently on THAT ISSUE) is just laziness and at times malice on their part.

I have a real visceral dislike of 'thought experiment' secular ethical philosophy; trolley problems or 'imagine you woke up attached to another person' etc. If you have to construct an almost impossible set of conditions in which to play, then what you're postulating is effectively worthless. All of us, no matter when or where we are tend to face variations of the same ethical and philosophical problems as the next person and otherwise complex philosophical exercises are best served by bearing that in mind.

I think what you say about 'lucidity' is true, but one persons inspirational advocate is another persons obvious fraud. So there always has to exist, for example, both Kant and Kantianism, as distinct theatres. You aren't served better by grasping Kant directly or by espousing a more accessible interpretation. Hume's treatise are relatively easy to understand now, in comparison to a lot of his contemporaries but he had to re-write them and often add unnecessary complications to them for the palette of his own audience.

As long as everyone doesn't talk across each other, I think better conversations can be had by people with different levels of engagement.

This last point is key, I think. The problem with modern philosophers isn't that they use specialized jargon - every discipline does that. You can't understand certain ideas without using words that most normal people are unfamiliar with.

The problem is that while those disciplines exist to add meaning to our lives in some way (as did philosophy for most of its existence), modern philosophers instead seem intent on destroying meaning. They take basically every statement a normal person could make and they go "is this really true though?". And guess what, if you do that, you can easily come up for a reasonable-sounding argument for why it isn't. You can do that with any statement. And then you're left with absolutely nothing. Including whatever statements you used to make your argument in the first place. Including your very ability to understand those statements. You have been talking across everyone else, perhaps even across yourself.

Some amount of doubt is healthy and productive - in fact, even a great amount of doubt can be! I have a ton of respect for Descartes, because set out to doubt all his certainties, not just as a fun thought experiment, but to show that he could rebuild all of them more rigorously on the basis of things which he couldn't possibly doubt. Whether he was successful or not is in the eye of the beholder, but the important thing is that he tried. So many modern philosophers instead seem content going "do we ever actually know anything?", shrugging and moving on with their lives. Of course then in their lives they are constantly acting on the basis that they do know certain things, that certain things have meaning. The color error theorist is still going to see the sky as blue any time they look out the window on a clear day. The moral error theorist is still going to have moral intuitions and wish to see them validated. So if these people have proven anything, it's the utter futility of their own theories in their own lives.

Again, I say this from a place of deep love for philosophy. I believe that philosophy is the greatest capacity to create meaning in our lives - but this creative power can just as well be used to destroy. My plea then is for philosophers to choose creation over destruction.

[LabourJersey]

This thread seems to be more of a discussion about Philosophy as an academic discipline today, or "pop philosophers" which is just a tiny slice of philosophy.

Philosophy encompasses a lot of different things. Plenty of normal people engage in "philosophical thinking" in the course of a normal day or normal life.

It does need to be rescued, in some way, from the philosophers.

(For what it's worth, I'm wondering how the same might be true for theologians too).

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

This thread seems to be more of a discussion about Philosophy as an academic discipline today, or "pop philosophers" which is just a tiny slice of philosophy.

Philosophy encompasses a lot of different things. Plenty of normal people engage in "philosophical thinking" in the course of a normal day or normal life.

It does need to be rescued, in some way, from the philosophers.

(For what it's worth, I'm wondering how the same might be true for theologians too).

Beautifully and succinctly put. To do philosophy is to cultivate a love for knowledge and for wisdom, which is relevant to everybody every day. It's a shame that philosophers seem to be some of the last people one expects to understand that.

[Torie]

I would hope that there are other ways to cultivate the love of knowledge and wisdom than via the "discipline" of philosophy. Otherwise, I am effectively the null set.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I would hope that there are other ways to cultivate the love of knowledge and wisdom than via the "discipline" of philosophy. Otherwise, I am effectively the null set.

The best way I can put it is that to me, philosophy is the conscious attempt to assign meaning to existence. We all instinctively, implicitly assign meaning to things we do by the mere fact of doing them. We wouldn't be able to eat or drink or get out of bed if doing this had no meaning to us (this is how I read Camus' line that "the only important philosophical question is suicide"). But when we ask ourselves, consciously, which things have meaning to us and why they have it, we are doing philosphy. Of course there is an infinity of answers we could give, and the only ones that matter ultimately will be those that are meaningful to us. I do think all of us can find some answers for ourselves, though, and we all benefit from doing so.

[Torie]

Yes, self reflection I find is good for myself. I was wondering this morning as I went from the bedroom to the kitchen in our flat in Hudson, NY, how on earth did this all come to pass, that I am here, in this place? I then I scratched Roby's ears, and released him to cavort in the courtyard, and the moment of rumination passed. Let the day begin.

[Antonio the Sixth]

On another note, since the article sings the praises of "hard sciences", we should be aware that there is in fact a similar tendency at work in certain highly theoretical fields of scientific academia. For example, this video makes a pretty compelling case that most of modern particle physics is dominated by highly unscientific speculation that has tried (and repeatedly, embarrassingly failed) to solve "problems" with the Standard Model that aren't actual problems. The video is well worth a watch (the author is herself a fairly respected theoretical physicist, to be clear, so her critiques come from a place of intimate knowledge):

The great irony here is that it seems like what particle physicists are doing is basically philosophy. They reject the standard model, not because it makes incorrect predictions, but because it's not "elegant" enough - in other words, it's not as meaningful as we'd like it to be. It makes a bunch of weird esoteric claims and these claims seem to work perfectly at predicting anything we can measure, but we as human beings don't really know what to make of them. So, physicists search for hidden meaning that will make the standard model intuitive. But of course that's not something science can tell us: all science can do is make predictions and test them.

[Benjamin Frank]

Labour Jersey made the same point as me. I personally agree that abstract philosophy ("how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?") is a waste of time, but there is much more to philosophy than that.

In Peanuts/Charie Brown, Charles Schulz clearly loved mocking philosophy by using that line, but Peanuts/Charlie Brown was also probably the most philosophical (mainstream) comic strip ever.

[°Leprechaun]

Existentialism is a school of philosophy that appeals to me.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Existentialism is a school of philosophy that appeals to me.

Me too. It recognizes that meaning doesn't have to be an Objective Feature of the outside world - it's something you can make at home, so to speak. I think that can a liberating realization for a lot of people. Personally, I don't know if I subscribe to it exactly - I might rather say that making meaning is a collective, collaborative effort. But still, it's a very inspiring perspective.

[°Leprechaun]

Existentialism is a school of philosophy that appeals to me.

Me too. It recognizes that meaning doesn't have to be an Objective Feature of the outside world - it's something you can make at home, so to speak. I think that can a liberating realization for a lot of people. Personally, I don't know if I subscribe to it exactly - I might rather say that making meaning is a collective, collaborative effort. But still, it's a very inspiring perspective.

I would add that specific existentialists from Kierkegaard to Sartre and those in between are good authors to read. It has been many many years since I read the former, and although I don't therefore remember much I do believe to that he is worth reading.

[Alcibiades]

The argument that philosophy is a waste of time is itself a philosophical claim — there’s no escaping philosophy! 

[All Along The Watchtower]

The argument that philosophy is a waste of time is itself a philosophical claim — there’s no escaping philosophy! 

So what you’re saying is philosophy is like….a prison?

[Georg Ebner]

Everyone - even the most primitive person - is dedicated to a certain philoSophy! The philoSophers are those, who can become aware of what they actually believe in. The "practical" people have - as SOCRATES proved - no idea, what they mean with "practical", "normal", "rational", what they do and what their actions' imPacts will be. Even as rulers or billionaires they are not more than helpless slaves of unknown ideoLogies.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

The argument that philosophy is a waste of time is itself a philosophical claim — there’s no escaping philosophy! 

So what you’re saying is philosophy is like….a prison?

I could summarily delete this post. I won't...but I could.

[Torie]

The argument that philosophy is a waste of time is itself a philosophical claim — there’s no escaping philosophy! 

Even if true, it has the virtue of brevity.

[All Along The Watchtower]

The argument that philosophy is a waste of time is itself a philosophical claim — there’s no escaping philosophy! 

So what you’re saying is philosophy is like….a prison?

I could summarily delete this post. I won't...but I could.

And I wouldn’t blame you if you did.

[Mr. Smith]

Well duh! 

The most known philosophers usually came from backgrounds where they had idle time and weren't working fields, then The Industrial Revolution and other innovative periods started opening up more and more leisure time... and entertainment only goes so far!  Are we supposed to contemplate our navels?

Perhaps "waste of time" is too pejorative for a natural consequence of not constantly needing productivity to survive.

Labour Jersey made the same point as me. I personally agree that abstract philosophy ("how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?") is a waste of time, but there is much more to philosophy than that.

In Peanuts/Charie Brown, Charles Schulz clearly loved mocking philosophy by using that line, but Peanuts/Charlie Brown was also probably the most philosophical (mainstream) comic strip ever.

I'll see you Peanuts and raise you one Calvin & Hobbes.

[Torie]

Yeah, OK, yeah, and if not philosophy, then it would be a emo concert, but the pretension of it all is the thing that makes it stand out in my mind. Aspirations to great thoughts I guess is inherently pretentious.

[Since I'm the mad scientist proclaimed by myself]

The comments in this thread by people who know philosophy are illuminating, but the article itself is kind of really stupid. I can't take an article that is offended by the idea that beauty is not an objective trait seriously. It has a lot of weird nonsense from what I've seen so far.