is there a reason to philosophy?

Great Debates
1

Since the questions aren’t ever answer, is there really a point?

The only reason i can think of for doing anything, is because we think it makes us happy. This includes the humanties, pursuing science or academics, acquiring power or monetary value, stimulating your sense, or whatever the hell else people do for that matter.

There doesn’t seem to be any coherent reason for life. So maybe we shoudl stop trying to explain it. Kind of like trying to prove God exists.

THERE MUST BE AN ANSWER TO THESE QUESTIONS.

Maybe there just isn’t any answer, like there isn’t any god.
I’m Not making any claim, just making a comparison.

so…
Diss Cuss

2

Besides every time i come up with things on my own i look it up on the internet adn fidn out it’s already been thought of and thoroughly written about.

For example, one day I’m sitting around and had a eureka moment. AHA!!! the Reason for everything is because people want to avoid pain and go towards pleasure!!!. ANd Happiness is either the least amount of pain or the most amount of pleasure!! and in moderation we can stave off boredom!!!

Turns out Epicureanism is the philosophy on this and that means I suck and am unoriginal liek any person on the planet who cares to make conclusions about anything

3

Sounds to me like you’re doing philosophy right there.
Just because a question doesn’t have a definitive, once-and-for-all answer doesn’t make it a bad question.

4

Informal logic and critical thinking are all products of the study of philosophy. The fight against ignorance could not be fought without philosophy.

"it is better to know some of the questions, than all of the answers." –James Thurber

5

The big questions may not get answered - indeed, if a question is answerable, it probably is not big enough - but smaller ones may get answered, or rendered moot, along the way. More importantly, it poses new questions. It generates new ways to look at things.

Ultimately, it’s about the process and not the outcome - or at least not any one outcome.

6

Well, there you go, then. Clearly, some people find philosophy makes them happy. For them, therefore, it has a point.

Granted, lots of otherwise-frivolous things make lots of people happy. This simple argument doesn’t establish philosophy to be non-frivolous in any other sense than that some people enjoy it. But that is your stated criterion.

7

Your premise is faulty. The questions investigated by philosophy are sometimes answered (although it can take many centuries of work). However, when an answer is arrived it, the issue in question ceases to be part of philosophy. It may become common sense, or it may become part of the conceptual foundations of a science. It is a historical illusion that the problems of philosophy are never solved, brought about by the fact that once a problem is solved (or understood well enough that the more detailed and systematic sort of methodologies that we call scientific research can fruitfully be applied to it), it ceases to be part of philosophy, and philosophy carries on with the problems that have not been solved yet. Maybe one day, more of them will be solved, but they are very difficult questions, so it may take a long time. To do worthwhile philosophy requires patience and a very high tolerance for frustration. The timeframes for philosophical research tend to be very long, but history has shown that the potential payoffs can be huge. If you can read this on your computer screen today, than k a philosopher (or rather, thank the many thousands of philosophers, long dead, who made modern science possible.)

The word “philosophy” comes from the Greek meaning “love of knowledge” (“knowledge” really gets closer to the original sense than “wisdom”), and the earliest philosophers were interested in knowing about all sorts of things, including many issues, such as the causes of natural phenomena, the structure of the universe and what it is made of, and the origins of life, that are now considered matters for science. However, it took about 2,000 years of philosophical worrying away at these problems before the understanding of the issues reached the stage at which they became recognizably scientific as opposed to philosophical questions. These days, we no longer call the people who work on these problems “philosophers” (300 years ago, that was what they were called) and their research requires different (and usually much more expensive) equipment.

Personally, however, I would not be surprised if the mind-body problem were solved, to the extent where it can safely be handed over entirely to the scientists, within the next 50 to 100 years. (Of course, that is just an educated guess, and may be quite wrong. Some people think they have solved the problem already, but that is because they do not understand what it is to have solved such a problem. On the other hand, there are others who can make a strong case that it can never be solved.)

Other problems, such as the nature of right and wrong, may well take a lot longer, and it is conceivable that they are truly insoluble. But maybe not, and the payoff of really knowing could, once again, be huge. Just don’t hold your breath (or even expect it to be within your lifetime).

8

I don’t think you understand what Philosophy is actually about. A lot of people don’t. As njtt explained, a lot of what used to be considered “Philosophy” is now called “Science”, and some current branches of Philosophy may go that way in the future.

I majored in Philosophy as an undergrad, and believe me the study of Philosophy involves very little time spent sitting around and talking about your feelings or crazy imaginary situations. This is a common misconception, and probably explains why there were far more people who thought they wanted to be Philosophy majors than actually made it through to the senior seminar. The required course in first-order logic caused many prospective Philosophy majors to decide they’d really rather do something else. Either you solved the proofs correctly or you didn’t, and if you didn’t then you weren’t going to pass the class.

At the undergraduate level a lot of Philosophy is really History of Philosophy, where one studies the work of important historic philosophers and learns about how they influenced one another and what impact their work had on their societies (and ours). There are some subjective issues raised in these courses, but the same is true for related fields like History and Literature. It’s certainly not all subjective, though. An exam in a Classical Philosophy course is going to have a lot of objective questions about what Heraclitus had to say about this and the differing opinions of Socrates and Aristotle on that.

There are areas like Ethics where there often will not be a single clear, objectively correct answer to a question, but this doesn’t mean there is no answer to these questions or that there’s no practical reason to worry about them. Question like “Should the state execute convicted murderers?” or “Should human cloning be permitted?” can be answered. They can be answered in different ways, but the argument that a society finds most compelling is going to “win”. It may not win forever, there could be a later change of opinion when it comes to what is the right thing to do, but how these questions are answered makes a real difference in the world. It can literally be a matter of life and death.

9

I think Philosophy has two great values, exercising the mind, and understanding other people’s ‘philosophies’.

The problems with philosophy are people who don’t understand it as ‘opinion’ instead of ‘science’. When it comes to areas like physics, philosophy doesn’t help explain new phenomena. When it comes to very complex areas like human behavior, it helps provide a means of understanding until we have the science available.

10

“Nonsense.” - Sitnam

11

If by “opinion” you mean views that people hold without any good justification, then philosophical views are no more “opinions” than scientific “facts” are. To imply that they are ‘mere opinions’ is to show a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of philosophy.

12

I agree. I think people have a natural inclination to ponder deep unanswerable questions, just like they have an inclination to art or music. It doesn’t really need any more point than that.

Also if people didn’t have that inclination they might not have come up with science or law or representative democracy. And I think there’s some value to trying to find a rational basis for ethics, even if it is ultimately a fool’s errand.

13

By ‘opinion’, in this case I only mean things that are not provable through demonstrative evidence, nothing else. I don’t consider philosophy worthless. There are different tools for different jobs.

14

“Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind.”

– Immanuel Kant

“Philosophy is concerned with two matters: soluble questions that are trivial, and crucial questions that are insoluble.”

– Stefan Kanfer

15

I am not sure what you understand by “demonstrative evidence,” but if you think it marks some sort of distinction in kind (rather than degree) between science and philosophy, you are mistaken. Science and philosophy

True, if you were talking about hammers and screwdrivers, but if you intend to imply that science and philosophy are different tools for different jobs, or that they are differentiated by the fact that they employ fundamentally different sorts of intellectual tools, you are mistaken. Both fields concerned with understanding reality, and both employ the same basic tools: observation and reason. Science and what, these days, is carried on under the rubric of philosophy do differ in the extent to which they employ these tools - contemporary philosophy devotes a lot more effort to reason, and rather little to observation, whereas most (not all) science devotes more effort to observation than to reason - but both always rely on some of both.

The best way to understand the relationship between science and philosophy is to recognize that science is a branch of philosophy that happens to have been been particularly successful in attaining a widely shared consensual understanding of its particular subject matter (roughly speaking, the natural world), and, as a consequence, is able to successfully explore it in much greater detail and precision than are other branches. As a consequence of the successful framework for understanding the natural world that has been developed in science, it becomes worthwhile for the sciences to observe and measure rare phenomena, and recondite, detailed features of phenomena. By contrast, those branches of philosophy that have net yet reached such a level of consensual understanding (over such questions as the nature of right and wrong, or the nature of knowledge) are unlikely to benefit from these sorts of detailed and recondite observations unless and until the basic conceptual foundations have been hammered out.

That is why scientists do a lot of experimentation, measurement and math, whereas the people now still known as philosophers (as well as the “natural philosophers,” the people who worked on trying to understand the natural world before the time of the scientific revolution) do relatively little. This can make science and philosophy appear, superficially, to be very different sorts of activity, but the appearance is misleading (especially as much of the detailed reasoning and argumentation that actually plays a large role in scientific research is largely hidden from the view of laypeople and even science undergraduates). At a deep level, the aims and methods of science and philosophy are the same.

16

Questions that are soluble and trivial will have long since been solved, and thus are no longer part of philosophy (if they ever were).

Any question that has been proved to be insoluble will also have ceased to be subject to philosophical investigation. Otherwise, the claim that the “crucial” questions with which philosophy concerns itself are insoluble is nothing but a fallible pessimistic induction from the fact that centuries of work has failed to produce generally agreed solutions to them. To me, however, the fact that it took about two millennia from the beginnings of Natural Philosophy before the problem of establishing a satisfactory conceptual foundation for the sciences was (very successfully) solved, suggest to me that the other problems of philosophy may not be insoluble at all, but just very hard, and the payoff from eventually solving them may be as spectacular as that of solving the foundational problems of Natural Philosophy has been.

In other words, I do not accept that the pessimism expressed by Kafner (or Kant) is either justified or wise.

17

How about if I said ‘demonstrative, repeatable, predictable, physical evidence’?

18

Where do these definitions leave logic and deductive reasoning? These are part of Philosophy and they aren’t based on physical evidence, but they’re no more (or, I suppose, no less) “opinion” than Mathematics is a matter of opinion.

Getting back to the OP, a part of Philosophy is learning about logical fallacies and valid, invalid, and sound arguments. This is useful because if you don’t understand these things you will misunderstand a lot of other things and may make bad decisions or wind up being taken advantage of by others.

19

I do not know what “physical” might mean in this context, apart from observational or empirical. That being said, the empirical observations upon which philosophy relies are usually rather trivial, commonplace facts, often so trivial that it may not be very salient that they are observationally based at all: facts like (to give a couple of examples off the top of my head) people who speak different languages use quite different words to refer to the same sorts of thing, or everybody eventually dies. (Of course, these facts are “trivial” only in the sense that they are commonplace and obvious, not in the sense that may not have far reaching implications.)

In virtue of their very triviality, such empirical observations are typically more repeatable and predictable than are most “scientific” observations, which often depend on special circumstances, rare objects or substances, and special apparatus (which usually requires great and highly specialized skills in order to be used effectively).

As Lamia quite rightly points out, philosophy also relies heavily on logic and deductive (and, indeed, inductive) reasoning, as does science.

The difference between science and philosophy is not a difference in kind, but a difference in degree along a number of dimensions, and although they can seem very different at the extremes of this variation, there are also a number of active areas of research where they blend into one another.

20

I’m not saying philosophy is illogical. And the term ‘opinion’ is unfair in the context of this discussion, because of course, opinion can consist of nonsense. I don’t even like to seperate philosophy from science either. Logic is something shared across the sciences. Actually all I was doing was responding to the OPs implication that if it can’t be proven with physical evidence, it is worthless. I’ll admit my original post handled that clumsily, when I addressed the misapplication of philosophy. Misapplication is a problem across the spectrum of sciences, which was the intent of my comment about tools, which in itself was a philosophical expression.

Philosophy can extend past the point of a science like physics. Physics depends on consistent physical evidence, and when that runs out philosophy can take over. When we discuss subjects like human behavior, philosophy seems to win out, even with a plethora of sociological studies trying to reduce it to physical terms. But when I want to know what happens in a chemical reaction, philosophy isn’t going to provide definitive answers.

I don’t think mathematics is a matter of opinion, or philosophy. It is all based on things that can be demonstrated physically. Before I would carry that argument any further, I’d have to consult a mathematician. I wouldn’t be able to describe the limits of mathematics myself.