Philospher, what is it good for?

Just a general discussion of what is philosophy versus what is science. Nothing to do with religion or politics though! No sir.

Fun link of quotes, because everyone likes that.

I know my brother-in-law got a Master’s degree in Philosophy, but never got a job in philosophy. He’ll be paying off those student loans until he dies.

My Master’s is in Psychology, so he isn’t the only one. I will be looking for a stats related job, since learning statistics was a focus of my work.

Science, at least in part, comes out of a philosophical framework. It’s premised on, among other things, the materialism of Democritus, the logic articulated by Aristotle, and the epistemological conceit that empiricism is a valid path to knowledge.

As for what philosophy is good for, I’m not sure that’s the right way to frame it. People have been doing philosophy since caveman times – asking the big questions is inevitable. If you’re going to do it, you might as well do it well. (I feel the same way about criticism, by the way.)

Can a philosopher get a job outside of academia? Heck if I know. It wouldn’t be the first thing you could get a degree in that had limited ‘real world’ applications.

This is what the prof showed for my Intro to Western Philosophy course:

I particularly like “No more search for truth until our demands are met.”

I can’t talk about purpose, but it seems that much of philosophy is constantly being subsumed by other fields, and new methods and approaches are created.

Sir Isaac Newton was originally a philosopher, but now is considered a physicist, as an example.

I think many modern day philosophers, especially those that study the mind, are no considered Economists, or Neuroscientists. The field of mind is only the most recent to jump from philosophy to psychology as breakthroughs in the statistics and technology allow the study and answer key questions.

I think that is the case of all science. It’s considered philosophy until the proper tools have been invented to study it.

Of course, there is still morality and the nature of life. For now.

Philosophy doesn’t just evolve into science, though. Maybe some does, but as science itself rests on certain philosophical premises, those premises must be tested by other means, I should think. For example, the idea that ‘proper tools’ must be invented to study a phenomenon presupposes that empirical observation, combined with logic, is the true path (or a true path, at least) to knowledge. When you consider certain foundational concepts, like the bases for logic or mathematics or other systems of thought, I’m not sure that a method dependent on them can also evaluate or validate them.

As for Newton, I think that has as much to do with language as anything else. We’ve retconned certain individuals like him, or Kepler, or Copernicus, into being ‘scientists’ when, as you say, they would have referred to themselves as natural philosophers. Definitions and categories are always going to be fluid.

I’d say that while it’s accurate to say the scope of philosophy has shrunk, the importance of philosophy hasn’t. It’s just we’re in this weird period of intellectual transition post-religion that being filled with consumerism and mass consumption.

So, sure, philosophy and science were at one point synonymous and that has increasingly stopped being the case. Sure, Plato enjoyed everyone to study math, and everyone had to study Aristotelian logic for centuries during the Middle Ages to be wise, and all that. But as the technical details of science superseded the theory of science, most people left the theory behind. (IE. spend all your time learning the math for orbital mechanics (or whatever), rather than the theory of knowledge that lets you use math to determine those mechanics).

Part of that long victory was the hard fought understanding that the world as it presented itself before us is actually trustable and real. Which sounds nobby, and it kind of is, but which a lot of preconceptions about religion and logic sent people careening off in askew directions, especially when monotheist religion came knocking and forced everyone to take on first assumptions and make philosophy fit with that (limits or unlimits of God’s ability to act, ect.).

However most Western and Eastern cultural systems are rooted in values inherited from religious beliefs (and which were accepted as givens), and if we’re going to find new sources of value it’s going to be a philosophical investigation. And that’s obviously most of what modern philosophers do and why anyone should care about it today, as both a supplement and replacement for religiously derived morality and values.

When I was in University, a long time ago, I took a first-year philosophy elective… for three days. I thought it would be cool, and it probably is at later levels. But at the lowest levels its very not-cool. Switched to Canadian history which was also a poorly laid-out class, but at least made it through.

Philosophically, why are undergraduate elective courses so seemingly-intentionally boring?

I’d say that we’ve reached a point in history and the accumulation of knowledge where the generalist, the naturalist, isn’t as useful as the specialist. All the people making discoveries have a Ph.D. and spend years researching and questioning and studying to find new discoveries. The days of the natural sciences when people like Darwin and Newton and Mendel made observations about the world around them using tools like mathematics, biology and such don’t really exist anymore.

I think I would have made a good naturalist. Not because I’m so smart, but I am quite inquisitive and very much enjoy the observation of the world around me. I love reading about philosophy - I remember taking several course in college, surrounded by lots of pre-law students who were there because they had to be, rolling their eyes at Plato’s Republic while I ate it up. Certainly I have my limits in this arena too, I’ve tried several times to get through Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and I just can’t do it. I eventually made my way through Gravity’s Rainbow but I think Sartre has me beat.

But there’s still the natural world - we’ll always have Paris. I love to take my kids down to the beach and look into the tide pools. Seeing them discover anemones and crabs and gunnels and think about the mysteries of the smallest things around us is gratifying. I always said when my kids were not yet born that I hoped they’d be curious, and I got my wish. I think curiosity keeps you young, and it keeps you asking questions. There will never be an end to mystery.

When I was in university not-quite-as-long-ago, I took a mid-level philosophy course that covered a lot of the more severe German philosophers, plus whoever it was that wrote Leviathan. The professor was also German, and had a very severe solid black eagle stitched onto the back-right pocket of his only pair of jeans.

That class was. . . interesting.

Philosophy is of incredible importance. George FR Ellis has had some good writings on it. Interesting article in the Scientific American: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/physicist-george-ellis-knocks-physicists-for-knocking-philosophy-falsification-free-will/

There’s something, some connection, between modern information over-saturation, knowledge specialization, the decline of philosophy, the rise of conspiracy theories revolving around knowledge, and the apparent distrust of knowledge.

That flat earther i’m arguing with over emails wants, in essence, to understand everything. It’s the “why” question of a 10 year old blown up to world shattering ignorance. Why is the world round? Why does light refract? Why is air denser closer to the earth? Why is water “level” in a container? This guy, and many like him, want to grasp with both hands every fact in the universe and understand it on their terms. They want to test the moon is real by shooting something up to it themselves and seeing it happen. And if they can’t they don’t believe it, they think it’s nonsense, they ask how do you know what “they” are telling you is true?

And this echos into our political dysfunction today, where increasingly large numbers of people believe only those facts that correspond with their preexisting beliefs, and outright distrust if not dismiss contrary evidence. They want to tear society apart and build it back again, to see how it actually works, with their own hands make sure that the inherited systems aren’t screwing them, aren’t superfluous, doesn’t “make sense” to their limited understanding.

This medieval-like mindset threatens the world, and dealing with it kind of is the urgent task of philosophy today, imo. How do you have a theory of knowledge if you distrust the information being used to base that theory on? And how can we get people to trust that information again?

See that sounds ok. I get that engineers taking a philosophy elective because they thought it would be the easiest… is not a good place for either students or professors to start with. So it’s a two-part issue.

I mean apart from the fact that the guy might have been a Nazi, yeah. There was some. . . vigorous discussion in class, to say the least :)


But a lot of (apologies) “soft” departments are kinda like that, the entry-level, requirement-checking classes are awash with outside majors who’re just there to meet a graduation prerequisite and professors who are wondering what went so wrong in their life that they’re trying to compress the sum total of a major field of human knowledge down into discrete 45 minute chunks for an audience of 300 3x/week.

But man, skip up to 200- or 300-level stuff, much less 4 and 5, and you can get some genuinely fascinating knowledge added to your brain banks. I think I’ve relayed before how I actually have more Classics courses on my transcript than actual Journalism ones, because the College of Communications was so oversaturated that they capped how may classes even majors could take, and I really liked Greek and Roman history. . .

. . . anyway, it’s possible that I might now know more about the Athenian economy circa the Peloponnesian War than I do about libel law in America circa 2018, but I don’t regret the experience :)

When I was in college as a Phil major I often thought about how large corporations should have philosophers on retainer. Companies like Facebook and Google could obviously benefit from professional moral and ethical guidance, but many more could just stand to have someone on staff whose job is just to think holistically about what they do.

Well, there is Industrial/Organization Psychology. It’s probably the only real money making in Psychology, at least before you get a Ph. D.

They study that sort of thing.

Right, but what is their mandate? And that looks inward, correct? Staff philosophers would not care about profit or shareholder value, but would care about society as a whole. You’d want that kind of person to be on top of things like a trend against crunch culture and who would have the responsibility to challenge a company founder before “100 hour work weeks” hit the newswire. Not just because it looks bad, not just because actually crunch is less efficient but because there are so many hidden premises about how an organization operates that should be examined for their effect internally and externally and be challenged. The idea is to fill in the gapes created by purely profit driven myopia to the benefit of society as a whole.