I ask this because it doesn’t seem to lead anywhere.
I get that philosophy is the study of knowledge, existence, reality, and all that good stuff. But what I don’t get is the point or the end game, since it seems like just about anything in it can be debated and still end up right. It’s very vague and arbitrary and much of it is based on how you define things. But for a field that pursues knowledge and wisdom they seem to give very little if any of what they claim to seek. All it seems to do is make you ask questions and doubt your knowledge and beliefs, but doesn’t give anything to replace that. It takes and takes but gives nothing back.
Like in the case of solipsism it introduces the possibility that you might be the only thing that exists and that anything outside of you is not possible to verify that it exists. It makes you doubt what is real to the point that those who buy into it usually are unable to leave it. But it doesn’t provide any way to solve the question it poses (like much of philosophy). The same goes for idealism, another idea that it can’t prove. So why bother if it gets nowhere?
Like the above states philosophical “truths” but the fact is that none of those can be proven to be true (and most are just opinions). How can a field that is supposed to study knowledge and wisdom give none of it out? Like I said, it just robs you of what you know until you are left with nothing and no way to figure it out. All you can ask is “how do you know” until you’re left with nothing.
In all seriousness, someone asked me once in college if I ever met a philosophy major that they liked. I thought about it for a minute and gave a firm “No”. She said, “Me neither”. That was about the full extent of my thoughts on the subject other than Philosophy 101 that I was forced to take and proved to be one of the most useless classes I could ever imagine.
My personal opinion is that Philosophy is the grandfather of most other academic disciplines but, as they spun off into fully developed fields of their own, it is no longer especially relevant.
Here’s how I tell what’s worth studying: How many jobs are in the Help Wanted section of your local paper (or Monster.com, etc.) for it? Of course I’m talking about a college or technical school education so that you can make a living.
However if you have a good paying job and just want to broaden your mental horizons, philosophy could be very interesting, but not my cup of tea.
You definitely should spend some time on philosophy. Everyone needs to organize their thoughts. You should ask yourself questions about what you believe and why you believe it; what you know and how you learn it; what’s right and what’s wrong. Without a personal philosophy, you’re no better than an animal or a robot. Or worse yet, you’re just going through life doing what other people tell you to do.
That said, too much philosophy is as bad as too little. Philosophy should be a guide to life not a substitute for life.
IMO as somebody that got remotely interested in it and took a few classes…but got a hard sciences degree…
If you study it to understand the logic and processes involved…good for you…maybe even very good for you…because those are very useful in the “real” world…
Despite a few courses in philosophy many years ago, I don’t really have a “personal philosophy.” (Certainly not one based on anything I studied) Yet I don’t go through life letting other people tell me what to do.
There are branches of philosophy that are worth studying on their own: epistemology, logic and ethics. These should actually be part of any high school education. If you don’t have a basic understanding of these by the time you’re in college, it may be too late.
Philosophy should only be studied with the goal of perhaps seeing others point of view on things. If you don’t give a shit about other’s POV and or looking for meaning to life, it will be a huge waste of time for all involved.
The point of the study of philosophy is to understand how to structure questions or propositions in a manner that is logical, semantically useful, and internally consistent. Philosophy by itself doesn’t provide any objectively verified answers in anything beyond the trivial, and even often questions the trivial or base assumptions of existance and meaning. When philosophers get wrapped around the axle arguing the definition of words rather than just defining them you end up with a lot of nasal gazing speculation about “the meaning of meaning”; but when the language is used to create logically rigorous propositions that can then be subjected to some kind of falsification, it becomes as valuable a tool as mathematics or measurement in terms of organizing and categorizing knowledge.
I think the biggest problem with philosophy, as a discipline, is that there’s no way to filter out the idiots from the geniuses, and so idiots often end up getting praised as geniuses. I strongly suspect that Plato and Aristotle, for instance, set back the development of human knowledge far more than they advanced it.
I consider the Philosophy courses I took to be invaluable. It was not my major, but I satisfied various requirements with them. Philosophy can give you a good base to work from. I have known Philosophy majors who did find gainful employment in the corporate world.
Firstly, many of the physical and social sciences were once considered the domain of philosophy. So essentially, it’s not that philosophy doesn’t lead anywhere, it’s that when it does, we stop calling it philosophy.
Secondly while often it’s difficult to prove particular philosophical positions right, it’s often very possible to show logical errors in wrong positions. And often these incorrect positions are very popular ones in the general populace.
It’s instructive that if you go to a webpage on “creation science” for example, they are often very critical of contemporary philosophy, and then you encounter a lot of (flawed) ideas about the basis of knowledge and what science is. You often see this: people put down philosophy in the same breath as trying to put out their own philosophical ideas.
Whether it’s worth studying it depends on many factors, many of which are personal to you.
As implied above I think you can do useful work both writing philsophy and popularizing some of its best ideas. There are good careers there but probably not enough to support the number of philosophy majors.
However, some employers recognize that critical thinking skills can be useful generally so it can be an asset for various industries. If you can partner philosophy with maths or comp sci, say, you should be in good shape employment-wise while studying something that may be more interesting to you than going full-on comp sci major.
A full semester dedicated to reading and studying Plato’s Republic: dead waste of time.
A full semester studying symbolic logic, with applications to critical thinking? Great! One of the best classes you’ll ever take.
A full semester doing a rough survey of the history of philosophy, from the Greeks through the moderns? Highly educational and hugely enriching. It will seriously broaden your comprehension of the world. (A.J. Ayer’s “Language, Truth, and Logic” was worth it all by itself.)
A full semester studying Transcendental Meditation? Not only a waste of time, but a damned rip-off too.