Literally, in terms of this thread. You asked what the value of philosophy is in your OP. That question itself is a philosophical issue.
You do have a personal philosophy; you don’t go through life letting other people tell you what to do.
I don’t mean to sound glib. But this is my point. Philosophy isn’t just some esoteric academic subject. It’s something ordinary people use on a daily basis without realizing what they’re using is philosophy.
A wise person once told me that studying the classics, including philosophy, is how we teach ourselves to think, to analyze, and to critique information. I agree with this but don’t feel that it goes far enough. What taking philosophy courses gave me was a methodology for how to move a society forward. Philosophy fights societal entropy because it forces one to question every thing and to constantly move forward from one question to the next until you get an answer. You may never get that answer, but you should never stop trying to get to it.
When you are constantly questioning and analyzing things, you are open to new ideas, even if finding such ideas was not the purpose of your analysis or your questions.
I would agree that you can parse too far and that too much philosophizing may be counterproductive. But so can too little.
I couldn’t help thinking reading Plato’s Dialogues: “Boy, this Socrates fellow sure does sound like a crazy, rambling old man!”
TM is not philosophy; it’s as much bullshit as dancing Wu Li masters. But any field has its share of charlatans, some of whom are in ways still brilliant; Ed Teller was a poster child for this.
I have some disagreement that there is no distinction between the idiots and geniuses in the field, but like other disciplines that have complex jargon and regularly changing principles it is necessary to have a thorough grasp of the basics and the developments to distinguish between brilliance and nonsense. There are philosophers who have a profound grasp of technical fields and apply their knowledge appropriately, and idiot “scientists” who assume that their accomplishments in some narrow field of research translate in an inclusive grasp of all areas of knowledge.
In the end, practical genius is a matter of tying your area of research to some useful field of knowledge. That is difficult in philosophy because it generally deals more with semantics (in one way or another) rather than measurable quantities. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t utility in (some of) the questions posed about philosophy.
Stranger
To get a taste and to check if the field is worth your time, I would recommend to check The Philosophy Tube on Youtube:
Now, using “Rick and Morty” to explain existentialism? One of the best Youtube videos IMHO.
Similarly, check also the School of Life Philosophy section (From a different group of educators), anyone that can explain Hegel and make him understandable deserves an award. They owe a lot of their style to Monthy Pyton Animator Terry Gillian.
And I responded to that. But I also thought I’d cover whether it’s a good career option because of the title of the thread.
Actually philosophy causes stagnation by making people question everything and doubting their own knowledge. As I have said, it just creates doubt without offering answers. It robs people of direction because it ultimately cannot prove any of its claims. It will even argue about what direction “forward” is by stating that it is arbitrary or does not exist altogether.
Put it another way, my life was simpler without studying it and I was able to get things done. But afterwards there’s just too much doubt to do anything.
Ah so the OP was not really asking a question: you’re trying to argue a specific position.
Well, I disagree. If there are certain things that we don’t know, do you think it’s better to acknowledge that or just try to handwave them? Personally, I’d like to have my eyes open.
Or, as I alluded upthread, people believe things that can be readily proven false. For example, on belief in God: sure we can’t disprove gods themselves because we can’t prove a negative. But we can demonstrate that the many “proofs” of God’s existence simply don’t work.
So who is the person in stagnation: the person who believes in an utterly flawed proof, and bases their life on that, or the person who’s aware the proofs don’t work, and forms an informed opinion?
Philosophy makes you think. Life without thinking may be simpler but it’s not much of a life.
If you just want somebody who will tell you answers and give you direction and put aside your doubts, maybe you should consider joining a cult.
I wouldn’t but you can’t argue they do get things done (not good things but still things).
And yet that still doesn’t rule out the existence of a god. Disproving our proofs doesn’t make the end result any less real or a possibility. You aren’t really “opening your eyes” so much as not doing anything.
People believe in things that can’t be proven true like an external and independent reality or the existence of other minds and people. What difference is there between that and “false” beliefs?
You asked who is in stagnation, I say the one who makes an informed opinion. Because they don’t accept the basic answer and move on with their life. Their quest for more is really just a quest for nothing because nothing can be truly known. The other guy at least gets stuff done even if you think he is wrong at least he is moving while you only think you are.
There are many subjects we study not for their own intrinsic value but for the skills that we develop by way of their study.
I personally found great value in geometry and later in organic chemistry because of how they helped me learn to approach problem-solving. I do not use geometry or organic chemistry in what I do but I am a better thinker for having had those classes.
The study of philosophy can have similar impact on the development of critical thinking skills and on the skill of approaching complex (and sometimes dense) written arguments in an analytic manner. Of course it can be taught in a manner that does not do that … just as science can be taught poorly. I suspect it often is.
Questioning everything and doubting your own knowledge is not stagnation: it is an essential prerequisite for intellectual progress. Thinking we know when we really do not … that’s stagnation. The point is not to teach anyone the answers or to impart knowledge. The point is the process of learning it can help refine our tools such that we can better determine which are the questions most worth asking.
Well, about getting things done…
[sub]From “The Secret Policeman’s Ball” 1979 benefit for Amnesty International., Peter Cook and Rowland Atkinson on a cult wondering how long to prepare for the end…
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Never mind lads… Same time tomorrow…
It’s showing that a proof doesn’t work, which is something. Plus of course, on the actual god question, we can use principles like occam’s razor, which we all use in our everyday life (knowingly or not), to show it’s not sensible to believe something with no grounds for belief.
This might be the crux of the problem you’re having.
For me, I don’t actually need to know that there is an external, independent reality: there are good reasons to behave as though there is regardless. I don’t know, and can’t know, whether all this is a dream say. But I know I can suffer physical and emotional pain and I can reduce these things by my actions in the “dream”.
Furthermore, this is actually another time where we can use Occam’s: if there’s nothing outside of the “dream” then the difference between dream and reality is moot. But the hypothesis that there is an outside is vulnerable to the razor: I should assume there is no outside until I have reason to suppose otherwise.
But I live my life the same as anyone, plus I take an interest in philosophy. Clearly real humans in the real world do not freeze just because they can’t explain everything.
I’m stealing this expression!
(I don’t care that it’s a typo—it’s good!)
A perfect definition for a person whose ego is so smugly centered around himself that he looks down his nose at people who don’t understand why he is obviously superior to them. In other words–a typical philosphy undergrad.*
*i.e. myself.
For an entire semester.
But, man, it was fun whle it lasted. 
Yes, this.
Because without it, we get this:
Without knowing how to recognize and use logic and how to apply ethics, we end up with antivaxxers and flat earthers and 911 truthers and Sandy Hook deniers and people who talk at the theater. People can be very, very sure of their position and still be dead wrong.
We need MORE Philosophy taught, and we need it taught younger, and better.
Philosophy is the root of that “critical thinking” and “common sense” stuff we all moan no one has today. All the “nasal gazing” about the existence of God and angels dancing on pinheads is just practice exercises so that you learn how to think and make a decent counterargument when someone forgets that planes exist and proposes we build a giant wall to stop immigration.
This meme has enjoyed much more than its allotted 15 minutes of fame and needs to be put to a merciless and immediate death.
Thank you. My response to the OP was going to be pretty much this.
Philosophy is something you almost can’t help doing, if you’re at all mentally awake, and go through life thinking and questioning and arguing rather than just thoughtlessly existing.
Formal study of philosophy can be helpful and fascinating because it can expose you to the thinking of other great minds, and because it can help to make your own thinking more disciplined and rigorous. But it can also lead you down a rabbit hole of meaningless irrelevancies (which is okay if you actually enjoy that sort of thing, but is a lot harder to justify to people who don’t).
There’s been some good answers in this thread—yes, philosophy does help us sharpen our cognitive faculties; and yes, philosophy gives rise to the individual sciences (actually, I don’t believe there’s really a useful distinction between ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’—it’s just that people seem to take philosophy that produces ‘results’ as naively defined, call it ‘science’, and then go on complaining that philosophy never produces any results—which those of us having paid attention in their philosophy classes on sound logical reasoning will recognize as the informal fallacy of ‘moving the goalposts’).
But actually, the best argument for philosophy and its importance, to me, is that it does produce concrete, visible results, that in fact are so entrenched within our everyday world that, like air, they’re all too easily missed. It doesn’t matter if you take politics, society, ethics; ideas like democracy, universal human rights, the social contract; or developments like universal suffrage, equality between men and women, or the recognition of animal rights—if you go back far enough (or just a little, in some cases), you’ll find them discussed in dusty tomes of philosophy long before they really enter into everyday life.
However, once they have, it becomes hard to imagine that things might be different; and the flipside of that is that, steeped in present society, it needs some training to see beyond its borders and question its tenets—training that the study of philosophy provides. The philosophical argument, all the while, moves on to topics that may seem as bewildering to the average Joe today as the idea that women might vote to the 18th century farmer, or the notion of democracy to the medieval aristocrat. (Of course, that’s an idealization; ideas never really develop in quite such an orderly, linear fashion, but it’ll do as a first approximation.)
So, those who typically question the value of philosophy do so while enjoying their social liberties, their right to vote, their social security, their equal rights, and so on, all the while wondering—but what has philosophy ever done for us?
(No, I’m not saying that philosophy was solely responsible for all the social change for the better in the world. I’m also not saying that there isn’t plenty of stupid philosophy around, the above ‘simulation argument’ being a case in point. I’m admittedly exaggerating somewhat, but only to counterbalance the all-to-prevalent ‘philosophy is just navelgazing eggheads’-point of view.)
One thing that I think everybody should take away from philosophy is a willingness and ability to question one’s assumptions, and recognize especially the unspoken, implicit ones. In some cases, this doesn’t get us very far, perhaps: if we ask, how valid is it really that we believe there is an external world, and we find out that it turns out we don’t really have good justification for that, then well, this doesn’t really help us terribly much—except, perhaps, in building value systems that make life worthwhile even in this case, as Mijin alluded to. But once we started questioning how valid it really is that women are inferior to men, we started building a better, more just society (a process which, of course, remains unfinished to this day)—so, while sometimes you don’t really get much of objective value, occasionally, you hit upon a game-changer.
And without many experiments perhaps coming up with nothing more than another tome nobody reads (but that at least got somebody tenure, maybe), we’d never hit the occasional paydirt.
My required HS coursework included Philosophy in 11th grade, History of Philosophy in 12th. While I still haven’t quite understood the distinction between “Reason and Faith” and “Paths of Knowledge” (two of the three possible themes we had in the second evaluation of 12th grade), and from what I hear most of my classmates haven’t either, it provided a background to issues in History, Economics or Politics which has often come in handy.
Previously we’d studied for example that Hobbes’ Leviathan, Marx’ Kapital or the reintroduction of lost works into Medieval Europe through Al-Andalus were very important, but we hadn’t gone into why. We hadn’t seen in what aspects they differred from then-mainstream views on governance, economics or the structure of the world; analyzing that helps frame and understand economical, social and political changes contemporary to those works. It also helps frame things that are going on now: I can recognize how certain political parties derive from this or that previous ideology and what elements they’ve taken from others, to me they don’t just spring up spontaneously.
I was in the Pure Sciences track, my college degree is in ChemE, but like many engineers I really like having a better understanding of “why” history happened than can be had from lists of dates. Philosophy was one of the disciplines which helped provide that understanding.