Philosophy: What is it good for?

This armchair philosopher’s opinions:

Logic does count, thanks. And so, incidentally, does science. Science is a branch of philosophy. Without philosophy, there’d be no science as we know it. In fact, science, religion, and logic are all sibling branches of epistemology. You can look at the branches, something like this:



                                    Philosophy
                                        |
   Metaphysics    —    Epistemology     —      Aesthetics      —      Ethics
                             |
                 Science — Logic — Religion


The underlying foundation of science is a philosophical principle known as “falsifiability”. For a theory to be scientific in nature, it must risk falsification; that is, it must be vulnerable to testing by experiment whether it is false. Philosophers, like the notable Karl Popper, helped formulate modern science.

Meanwhile, elsewhere… In epistemology, philosophy has given you modal logic, which has vital applications in computer science. In metaphysics, philosophy has given you quantum reality, a means of contextualizing the claims of quantum physics. (“The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct ‘actuality’ of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is impossible . . . Atoms are not things.” — Werner Heisenberg). In aesthetics, philosophy has given you everything from music theory to modern art. In ethics, philosophy has given you democratic government, law, and libertarianism.

One of the unfair questions you mentioned. If you ask the same question of technology, limiting answers only to theoretical technology, you’d be hard pressed to get a response. But practical applications of philosophy, like religion for example, have helped to make your life better by making the lives of others (and therefore the world around you) better. For all the faults of religion, it has given you charities based on philosophies of love that lift people out of dispair and hopelessness. Practical applications of ethics have prevented you and those you love from being used as scientific quinea pigs. Practical applications of epistemology have given you schools, universities, and theories of learning. Practical applications of aesthetics have given you architectural wonders. Practical applications of metaphysics have given you computer artificial intelligence (primitive now, perhaps, but further advances may be pending.)

We already have. There is a branch of science that deals with the ethics of science. But I suspect that what you’re asking for is some sort of obective ethic, and are confusing it with being scientific in nature. Science will never be able to objectively arbitrate ethical disputes. Even if you know why someone behaves a certain and are able to manipulate it, the choice of which behavior is better than which is scientifically arbitrary.

It had little/nothing to do with perceived rights and everything to do with communal prosperity. “If we both don’t kill each other, we’ll both live a lot longer” and eventually “If we help each other out, our lives will be a lot easier.” Historically, it is pretty easy to determine what’s right and whats wrong in the context of a society trying to survive. Everything we need to know about how to progress socially has been learned from history and people acting contrary to survival, not from some great philosophical thinker or revolutionary idea.

Thanks Lib… I agree…

Nope. History has several examples of “bad” countries prospering by wiping out the competitors.

Rome V. Carthage, for example.

“Right and Wrong” are subjective, philosophical ideas.

Many societal, or diplomatic, actions we now consider “wrong” were, at the time they were undertaken, justified with rational or practical reasoning. In many cases, those actions resulted in the very goal those people set out to achieve, proving the validity of their national/societal needs.

Afterwords, sometimes several generations later, those actions are judged as being slightly less than noble causes.

So, practical logic dictates that you do “x”. (Like force someone off their land so you can have access to a resource.) Your people benefit from that resource. Later, you feel guilty for having forced those folks off their land. That guilt is due to the philosophical idea of thier right to exist/own their own land, not due to a cold logical calculation of cost/benefit analysis.

  1. i don’t know all that much either, but I have a definite impression from reading about philosophy taken as a formal enterprise. That impression is that philosophers have not settled one single question with a definitive answer.

  2. I don’t know about you, but I doubt that very many people study the philosophers in order to determine how they should live.

  3. I doubt a scientific code of ethics can be developed. I’m a believer in doing what is expedient. Life is much too complex for any predetermined set of rules to be of any use in day-to-day living.

I’m not aware of too many things… :wink:

Just backing up my argument there. Last I checked the Roman empire fell. Also notice the worldwide outcry when one country bullies another today.

Yes, right and wrong are subjective - they’re human ideas. As you say, right and wrong are changing over time. Since they change over time, its quite impossible for them to be a philosophical construct because philosophy is dependent upon definition and language. If the definitions are continually changing, the philosophy of them is moot as there are no grounds to stand upon for argument. You can only come to consensus about long term affects of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ actions in historical context.

The guilt is a hard-wired biological reaction and a great example of us learning from history. We learned that pushing people off their land creates enormous internal conflicts that makes obtaining those resources more difficult - thus not conducive to long term prosperity and survival. Hell, the effects are still with us today in regards to the Native Americans.

Just were do these ‘rights’ you speak of originate from? Can you point them out to me in a document? Cite them from some source?

I couldn’t put it better than Ogre; the Golden Rule is the first thing I thought of. I don’t know if it could be characterised as a “breakthrough”, since after all we don’t know at what point people thought of it. But it’s definetly an equivalent of E=mc^2.

But as with all other things in philosophy, it depends very much on what you agree with. We can’t say who’s right, so my idea of a big philosophical breakthrough might be totally different to yours but equally valid. It’s difficult to compare scientific breakthroughs and philosophical breakthroughs in this way because generally with science these lead to new understandings which give tangible results directly from them. With philosophy, there are no such tangible results; we can’t actually know that what we think is a new understanding actually works or not.

Without philosophy you would have no concept of “better” in terms of your life. Science and religion may make your life pleasant or give you a sense of fulfilment, but we need philosophy to be able to say that’s better than an alternative. So yes, philosophy has made your life better, in that with it you are able to evaluate your life and see what is good and what’s bad.

Merging, yes, I’d say so. Certainly one could measure the results of one’s code of ethics in a scientific manner, or actually base our ethics on scientific principles. It’s possible to do now, really. But people prefer not to base their ideas of ethics solely on science (and I don’t mean just religious people); I can’t speak for anyone else, but I would say a code of ethics that only took science into account would be a very limiting one.

I appreciate the inputs so far, and I haven’t been responding much because I’m still digesting them. I hope to get some detailed responses in this weekend. Anyway, I hate it when people start a thread and then abandon it right away, so I just wanted to say that I’m not doing that. I’ve read all the responses and have jotted down some notes. I’ll put them together when I have a coherent response.

I think a feeling of fairness is vital, and thus vengeance is an honorable pursuit.

Rome fell not because of it’s actions with Carthage. Rome prospered for a few centuries after decisively wiping out Carthage. The empirical lesson here is that war can provide benefits to a society.

Which I am contending stems from several reasons, not the least of which is a philosophy that a negotiated peace is more preferable to genocide.

Huh? How else do humans communicate? Through standardised agreed upon symbols and sounds. I’m not following you here…

But you judge that context using emotion/philosophy, not science/formulas. (Science and formulas change too, as better ones come along.)

Are you saying that because our outlooks on life changes over time, previous philosophical outlooks (that have been decided to be obsolete) don’t really count as philosophy?

Both Science and Philosophy have evolved as we grow and learn more about ourselves and the Universe. That is (and should be) the natural order of things. I think it’s unreasonable to expect philosophers to have gotten everything right as soon as we crawled from the primordial ooze.

Umm, how can guilt be both hardwired, and a behavior taught or learned at the same time?

Oh really? So, the resources we obtained from the lands we forced the Native Americans off of are coming out at a reduced rate? Umm, got any numbers on that?

These ideas of rights have evolved over time. Many philosophers throughout history have brought these up in written form for us to peruse at our leisure. I am sure you have heard of a few.

The US Declaration of Independence (or is it the Billl of Rights?) and Abe Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation has a basis in “All men are created equal” philosophy. (They were part of the evolution of this philosophy, not the “scource” documents, but these documents continue to shape the life and laws within the borders of the USA even today.)

Some are second hand accounts, as either the original works may have been lost, or the philosopher himself never actually wrote them down, like Jesus’ teachings… “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. (Even if you dont think Jesus himself may have said this word for word, someone did, and then they attributted those ideas to him in time for them to get into the Bible.)

I find your request for cites on the ultimate scource of “Human Rights” philosophy interesting. Do you think that 21st Century Humans are “better, smarter, more culturally refined, and just plain more attractive, too” than the barbarians of the past, and that those barbarians did not debate these various issues?

So where is this Roman Empire today again? You might draw that short-term lesson, but society as a whole has learned the long-term lesson as evidenced by countless countries representative governments and timidity towards war and aggression.

And how did this ‘philosophy’ develop? This ‘philosophy’ is based on the fact that exterminating entire populations of people causes massive discontent. It’s not some revolutionary idea that people are unhappy when everyone around them is dying, and thus they are an unstable populace.

Yes that is precisely how humans communicate. Humans with their individually subjective (not universal) sense of morals and ethics, rights and wrongs.

No you don’t! It is judged on perceived universal good/survival. How you measure that can be entirely scientific and formulaic.

That’s far too limiting. I’m saying that nothing counts and philosophy, or at least that philosophy, as a discipline, hasn’t had a net effect on society, but rather laws and history actually have where people might assign the credit to philosophy.

I’m not arguing for science over philosophy (or maybe I am and just don’t realize it yet). What I’m saying is that philosophy doesn’t get us anywhere. They’d be better off analyzing real history and demonstrating empirically (uh oh here comes the science) what events were ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and what we can do to repeat the good and what we can do to prevent the bad.

Sloppy wording on my part. Guilt, like any other emotion is a chemical reaction in the brain. Our emotions are optimized for group survival. The lesson learned is that slaughtering and mass-displacing people causes bad stuff.

Societal cost, not necessarily monetary. Although if you do really want to analyze the numbers be sure to factor in how much money Americans lose to Native American-owned casinos, how much land has now be set aside for them, and how much in taxes they’re not paying right now.

My request for a cite of rights was rhetorical. You can cite books where certain people claim that we might have rights, but at the end of the day you’re left with nothing as to the actual origin of rights. You can appeal to god or nature, but the fact of the matter is that you can’t find universal rights based on god or nature, since there is no single voice of god to every human being and nature is neutral on morality (hornets slaughtering beesisn’t immoral, its nature). Our rights have been developed over the course of time as a combatant against wrongs. Rights are a human construct.

I’m reminded of the story about the guy who went through life abusing everyone with whom he had contact. Turned out he was a masochist practicing the Golden Rule.

I know I’ve said this before, but science IS philosophy, dude. Science is a branch of philosophy.

Until about 200-250 years ago, scientists were called “natural philosophers.”

What is Philosophy good for ?
A question that has occupied some of our finest minds for millennia.

A less flippant answer is that it trains thinking in ways that doesn’t take the obvious for granted.

As Lib already pointed out, dude.

But of course in reality today few doing science consider themselves to be philosphers, and those who study philosophy are rarely scientists.

I’d look at Lib’s table more as a sort of family tree. (And I’d leave religion as an older sibling of philosophy more than a descendant of, trying also to answer all of the questions of how the universe works at the same time.) Philosophy (as that over-reaching category) was an ancestor of science. Science would not have been possible without it and knowledge of philosophy is useful to the study of science from a historical perspective. It is useful to know where your roots originated. Giving birth to science was one of philosophy’s big moments.

Yes, could someone give some examples of philosophical breakthroughs? The assumption on my part is that it would require an absence of a particular philosophy prior to the “breakthrough” and an absence of that philosophy in societies that haven’t been exposed to the articulated expression of that philosophy. Just writing down a common idea however intelligently expressed does not constitute a breakthrough does it?

That approach makes an interesting table, too. As you probably deduced, I was trying to draw an epistemic table since the OP’s question was basically an epistemological one — breakthroughs in knowledge. And so it was in that sense that I put science, logic, and religion on the same level: science for its empirical epistemology; logic for its analytical epistemology; and religion for its revelatory epistemology. Science and religion could also branch off from metaphysics, and religion also from ethics. Lately, I have figured out that my own faith (and the teachings of Jesus) derive from aesthetics. Anyway, that’s another topic…

I think of philosophy as being a kind of mathematical way to do poetry, or a poetic way to do mathematics.

In philosophy, we are looking for ways to determine, and make articulate, our relation to the abstracta which underly the way we live.

In other words, and much more clearly tritely (but I think correctly nonetheless): we’re trying to say (not so much discover) what the meaning of life is, in a very broad sense.

Well, I should come up with some examples.

-FrL-

I gave several, actually. Modal logic alone was a gargantuan breakthrough, especially for the field of computer science.