8 ms·

This is a great thought provoking article about the intricacies and paradoxes of our current society. It's a little OT but I want to ask HN a simple question.

This is a great thought provoking article about the intricacies and paradoxes of our current society. It's a little OT but I want to ask HN a simple question. The vast majority of my friends and acquaintances completely despise philosophy and they have one single question: what is the usefulness of philosophy? I am often inspired by reading philosophy related articles, as I was inspired by my philosophy teacher in high school. Unfortunately/fortunately I was in another country with a completely different educational system. In this country most people only meet philosophy in a single semester in college and it's only a rush to memorize the most things possible about philosophers. How do I explain the importance of philosophy for the development of our mind?

cafard 11y ago
The pragmatic (in the non-philosophical sense) argument is that it is less than helpful to be a Spinozist or Cartesian or whatever without knowing it, and without knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the position. C.S. Peirce (who trained as a chemist) remarked that much of what was called "plain common sense" was simply Aristotle. I encountered a teacher in an NLP course who quoted Aristotle's four types of causes without having any idea that it came from Aristotle. Listen long enough and you will Kant's Antinomies of Pure Reason argued forward and back by people who haven't cracked The Critique of Pure Reason. The other argument is that it is a challenge and a pleasure to follow some of the strongest minds as they make, elaborate, and challenge theories. Not everyone will find it a pleasure. Still, I suspect that the difference between encountering Plato or Locke in a one-semester summary and actually reading Plato or Locke is comparable to the difference between encountering "The Marriage of Figaro" in a plot synopsis and in attending a competent performance. Beyon
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  The pragmatic in me would rather meet Plato and Locke in a one semester summary than reading Plato or Locke and working out the exegesis out of it. I agree these are different experiences that bring different kind of pleasure though. Yes, I also hit wikipedia to know how the Fringe and Life on Mars would end because the fillers were too much to bear.
  - cafard 11y ago
    The advantage of your approach is that philosophers in general are responding to their predecessors and the difficulties they have found there. Reading any given philosopher without sufficient context will be unprofitable. Still, I think that if you find time, you are better off getting the context and reading the source.
- msutherl 11y ago
  Indeed, ignorance of the history of ideas leads people to miss that "common sense" arguments were once revolutionary ideas, thought up and explained, or at least distilled, by a single person.
- romaniv 11y ago
  The pragmatic (in the non-philosophical sense) argument is that it is less than helpful to be a Spinozist or Cartesian or whatever without knowing it, and without knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the position. Because that forces you to actually think through your positions and argue for them using your own words, rather than deliberately obscure academic slang? In natural sciences and math the simplest theory that works is the preferable one to use. In "modern" philosophy and various branches of academic criticism everyone tries to outdo each other in complexity. The practical result of it is that many people operate under false assumption: the assumption that if no one understands you, you automatically "win". This does nothing to improve the quality of reasoning or discourse.
  - Retric 11y ago
    There are a few mental tools that show up from watching arguments get torn apart on a regular basis. The failure points of Bayesian probability is a great example of this. Suppose I start drawing cards from a 52 card deck of cards and I ask you to estimate the odds that the next card will be a 6H. You work though the math and everything looks fine. I draw AH, JC, 2S, 6H, and all is well with the world, except the next card is another JD. Now what? What if the next card is a picture of an Apple followed by a 2S? PS: The failure point being you need a probability that your prior probability estimate is right, and then a probability that that prior estimate is right recursively.
  - A_COMPUTER 11y ago
    Trying to learn physics solely through experimentation instead of a from a book of the accumulated efforts and failures of generations of people, would be a phenomenal waste of time. Philosophy isn't any different in that regard.
    - romaniv 11y ago
      We're not talking about learning theoretical physics. We're talking about presenting arguments, usually involving relatively mundane subjects. "If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself." - Albert Einstein
lmm 11y ago
> How do I explain the importance of philosophy for the development of our mind? If you can't explain it, are you sure it's really there? If philosophy is valuable, give concrete examples of cases where it's helped you. Programmers in particular are great at abstracting by themselves, are more than capable of spotting the general principles - you need to give them the specific examples.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Straightforward answer is that philosophy will give you new insights and patterns as to decoding the human condition that you either never realized before, or did but never elaborated on them.
johnchristopher 11y ago
> what is the usefulness of philosophy? You could tell them asking that question is actually `practising philosophy'.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  That's like defining recursion by saying "see: recursion". It's a neat word-game, but it doesn't answer the question.
kijin 11y ago
Philosophy Ph.D. here. Your friends are right to despise philosophy, if by "philosophy" you mean the kind of thing that most students learn in college. I once taught a course like that, too, and I'm not proud about it at all. In order to appreciate the value of philosophy, you need to define it in a different way. Philosophy is not a collection of knowledge, but a way of life that never tires of asking "why?", uses the power of reason to figure out the answer, and tries to live according to that answer. In other words, the life of a philosopher is a life of criticism. It is a life of reflection, a life dedicated to developing and refining the one faculty that distinguishes us from all other animals. I honestly don't give a shit about any of the dead white guys that we call philosophers. Because the point of philosophy is not to learn who they were and what they said. The point is to learn the way of life that those people exemplified. The content doesn't really matter; most of that is wrong anyway. The methodologies, however, are worth learning. How to spot a fallacy, how to construct convincing counterexamples, how to go about dissecting a tightly woven rhetoric so that it collapses as spectacularly as possible. I think philosophy is to the mind what exercise is to the body. You don't become an athlete by memorizing trivia about famous athletes; you become one by emulating their daily routines. Similarly, you don't learn philosophy by memorizing what Descartes said; you become a philosopher by learning to think like him in everyday life and practicing it until you're good at it. STEM fields also help you train your mind, but usually in more specific ways. Philosophy is more general. It's like maintaining a generally active lifestyle vs. training specific muscles.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  >Philosophy is not a collection of knowledge, but a way of life that never tires of asking "why?", uses the power of reason to figure out the answer, and tries to live according to that answer. Doesn't this kind of talk presume a foundationalist epistemology that is actually quite hard to justify?
  - AKrumbach 11y ago
    Any epistemology is "actually quite hard to justify" (c.f. either René Descartes or Samuel Johnson's refutation of Berkeley's immaterialism).
Sven7 11y ago
You don't have too. This strange notion that everyone has to be "educated" about things, is propagated for the wrong reasons mostly for the benefit of a few. Those that are interested will find the info they seek. The barriers are very low these days. And if others "don't get" your interests find those that do. It's not too hard.
- spdionis 11y ago
  I don't want to convert those people to being philosophy fans because I'm not that big of a fan either. I simply want them to at least respect it and not hate it.
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
The very best philosophy ties together knowledge from other fields and uses it to explain what the bleeding hell is going on in this whole "human life" thing. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of philosophy isn't really that good, and involves blatantly ignoring Wittgenstein to push words around and claim something of substance has been thought.
yarrel 11y ago
Philosophy is essentially a fandom. If they're geeks they'll love the details and drama. Philosophy does develop the mind but not in an interesting or useful way even from a philosophical point of view. Beyond Wittgenstein's take on philosophy as therapy is Zizek's (implicit) take on philosophy as entertainment. Zizek is right. So promote philosophy as fun rather than useful and geeky rather than literary and you won't go far wrong.
- Pamar 11y ago
  Personally I find Stoicism useful. And I suppose that other schools of thought (or subsets of other schools) could be useful, and/or I might even be "using" these without tracing these to a specific author.
_sword 11y ago
Perhaps introducing them to a bit of philosophy bundled with a few good jokes would be helpful: http://existentialcomics.com/ http://existentialcomics.com/
- spdionis 11y ago
  This was awesome. Thank you :). http://existentialcomics.com/comic/13 http://existentialcomics.com/comic/13
aridiculous 11y ago
It's simply anti-intellectualism. It's part of the fabric of contemporary American culture that's being exported all over the world. Not sure there's an easy path out from this. Reading, education, book clubs may help. "Useful" must be released from the confines of just "Useful for the market economy".
- spdionis 11y ago
  I live in a post soviet country and I don't think it is so heavily influenced by American culture. I actually found European people to be much more open to such matters. Otherwise I agree with you.
cp9 11y ago
insight on the human condition. it doesn't play to a STEM crowd, but calling it anti-intellectualism is hilariously wrong. It's asking the whys that science can't answer. Science can answer "Why is the sky blue" science cannot answer "why are we here? what is the meaning of the thing we call life?"
Tomte 11y ago
Giving a home to branches of philosophy, until they have matured enough to be considered their own discipline. Mathematics, physics, theology, biology, sociology, just about science started out as a sub-field of philosophy.
kafkaesque 11y ago
> what is the usefulness of philosophy? This is kind of the wrong question to ask, if I may say so. Once you realise that everything that is not science is philosophy, philosophy doesn't only become interesting, but essential to living a worthwhile life. A Ph.D in the comments said s/he didn't like teaching college philosophy, and I think this is partly to blame for what Philosophy (with uppercase P) has become--people interpret philosophy as that subject you take in school with archaic, primitive ideas. Every major philosopher has probably only one good idea, yet they've wasted thousands of words trying to explain it or find a solution. This is what students spend most of the time studying, so it becomes tiresome. Philosophy is really critical thinking and understanding the various modes of logic/reasoning our brain chooses when acting consciously or subconsciously. Our lives are not one of pure deductive reasoning. However, you'd be surprised how many people (even scientists) use deductive reasoning. Once we understand that a brain holds different modes of reasoning at the same time, we learn to talk more openly, consider another point's of view more carefully, and attack our differences less so readily. In turn, this creates a better society--one which is based on understanding why and how we do things. The only real enemy of contemporary philosophy is tradition. And there are certainly many of those still around. But listen to a theistic philosopher speak and observe how he acts. Then listen to a dogmatic cult preacher in his multi-millionaire dollar celebrity church or from a celebrity religion. Tell me which one you prefer. Philosophy teaches us to be inquisitive but not naive. It softens our emotions when considering others' differences, because most of us hold views that neither science nor philosophy can explain. Yet, just like in science, pleasure does not come from knowing the answer, rather from searching for the enigma. (Edited to clarify some ideas.)

cafard 11y ago

The pragmatic (in the non-philosophical sense) argument is that it is less than helpful to be a Spinozist or Cartesian or whatever without knowing it, and without knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the position. C.S. Peirce (who trained as a chemist) remarked that much of what was called "plain common sense" was simply Aristotle. I encountered a teacher in an NLP course who quoted Aristotle's four types of causes without having any idea that it came from Aristotle. Listen long enough and you will Kant's Antinomies of Pure Reason argued forward and back by people who haven't cracked The Critique of Pure Reason. The other argument is that it is a challenge and a pleasure to follow some of the strongest minds as they make, elaborate, and challenge theories. Not everyone will find it a pleasure. Still, I suspect that the difference between encountering Plato or Locke in a one-semester summary and actually reading Plato or Locke is comparable to the difference between encountering "The Marriage of Figaro" in a plot synopsis and in attending a competent performance. Beyon

johnchristopher 11y ago
The pragmatic in me would rather meet Plato and Locke in a one semester summary than reading Plato or Locke and working out the exegesis out of it. I agree these are different experiences that bring different kind of pleasure though. Yes, I also hit wikipedia to know how the Fringe and Life on Mars would end because the fillers were too much to bear.
- cafard 11y ago
  The advantage of your approach is that philosophers in general are responding to their predecessors and the difficulties they have found there. Reading any given philosopher without sufficient context will be unprofitable. Still, I think that if you find time, you are better off getting the context and reading the source.
msutherl 11y ago
Indeed, ignorance of the history of ideas leads people to miss that "common sense" arguments were once revolutionary ideas, thought up and explained, or at least distilled, by a single person.
romaniv 11y ago
The pragmatic (in the non-philosophical sense) argument is that it is less than helpful to be a Spinozist or Cartesian or whatever without knowing it, and without knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the position. Because that forces you to actually think through your positions and argue for them using your own words, rather than deliberately obscure academic slang? In natural sciences and math the simplest theory that works is the preferable one to use. In "modern" philosophy and various branches of academic criticism everyone tries to outdo each other in complexity. The practical result of it is that many people operate under false assumption: the assumption that if no one understands you, you automatically "win". This does nothing to improve the quality of reasoning or discourse.
- Retric 11y ago
  There are a few mental tools that show up from watching arguments get torn apart on a regular basis. The failure points of Bayesian probability is a great example of this. Suppose I start drawing cards from a 52 card deck of cards and I ask you to estimate the odds that the next card will be a 6H. You work though the math and everything looks fine. I draw AH, JC, 2S, 6H, and all is well with the world, except the next card is another JD. Now what? What if the next card is a picture of an Apple followed by a 2S? PS: The failure point being you need a probability that your prior probability estimate is right, and then a probability that that prior estimate is right recursively.
- A_COMPUTER 11y ago
  Trying to learn physics solely through experimentation instead of a from a book of the accumulated efforts and failures of generations of people, would be a phenomenal waste of time. Philosophy isn't any different in that regard.
  - romaniv 11y ago
    We're not talking about learning theoretical physics. We're talking about presenting arguments, usually involving relatively mundane subjects. "If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself." - Albert Einstein

lmm 11y ago

> How do I explain the importance of philosophy for the development of our mind? If you can't explain it, are you sure it's really there? If philosophy is valuable, give concrete examples of cases where it's helped you. Programmers in particular are great at abstracting by themselves, are more than capable of spotting the general principles - you need to give them the specific examples.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

Straightforward answer is that philosophy will give you new insights and patterns as to decoding the human condition that you either never realized before, or did but never elaborated on them.

johnchristopher 11y ago

> what is the usefulness of philosophy? You could tell them asking that question is actually `practising philosophy'.

eli_gottlieb 11y ago
That's like defining recursion by saying "see: recursion". It's a neat word-game, but it doesn't answer the question.

kijin 11y ago

Philosophy Ph.D. here. Your friends are right to despise philosophy, if by "philosophy" you mean the kind of thing that most students learn in college. I once taught a course like that, too, and I'm not proud about it at all. In order to appreciate the value of philosophy, you need to define it in a different way. Philosophy is not a collection of knowledge, but a way of life that never tires of asking "why?", uses the power of reason to figure out the answer, and tries to live according to that answer. In other words, the life of a philosopher is a life of criticism. It is a life of reflection, a life dedicated to developing and refining the one faculty that distinguishes us from all other animals. I honestly don't give a shit about any of the dead white guys that we call philosophers. Because the point of philosophy is not to learn who they were and what they said. The point is to learn the way of life that those people exemplified. The content doesn't really matter; most of that is wrong anyway. The methodologies, however, are worth learning. How to spot a fallacy, how to construct convincing counterexamples, how to go about dissecting a tightly woven rhetoric so that it collapses as spectacularly as possible. I think philosophy is to the mind what exercise is to the body. You don't become an athlete by memorizing trivia about famous athletes; you become one by emulating their daily routines. Similarly, you don't learn philosophy by memorizing what Descartes said; you become a philosopher by learning to think like him in everyday life and practicing it until you're good at it. STEM fields also help you train your mind, but usually in more specific ways. Philosophy is more general. It's like maintaining a generally active lifestyle vs. training specific muscles.

eli_gottlieb 11y ago
>Philosophy is not a collection of knowledge, but a way of life that never tires of asking "why?", uses the power of reason to figure out the answer, and tries to live according to that answer. Doesn't this kind of talk presume a foundationalist epistemology that is actually quite hard to justify?
- AKrumbach 11y ago
  Any epistemology is "actually quite hard to justify" (c.f. either René Descartes or Samuel Johnson's refutation of Berkeley's immaterialism).

Sven7 11y ago

You don't have too. This strange notion that everyone has to be "educated" about things, is propagated for the wrong reasons mostly for the benefit of a few. Those that are interested will find the info they seek. The barriers are very low these days. And if others "don't get" your interests find those that do. It's not too hard.

spdionis 11y ago
I don't want to convert those people to being philosophy fans because I'm not that big of a fan either. I simply want them to at least respect it and not hate it.

eli_gottlieb 11y ago

The very best philosophy ties together knowledge from other fields and uses it to explain what the bleeding hell is going on in this whole "human life" thing. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of philosophy isn't really that good, and involves blatantly ignoring Wittgenstein to push words around and claim something of substance has been thought.

yarrel 11y ago

Philosophy is essentially a fandom. If they're geeks they'll love the details and drama. Philosophy does develop the mind but not in an interesting or useful way even from a philosophical point of view. Beyond Wittgenstein's take on philosophy as therapy is Zizek's (implicit) take on philosophy as entertainment. Zizek is right. So promote philosophy as fun rather than useful and geeky rather than literary and you won't go far wrong.

Pamar 11y ago
Personally I find Stoicism useful. And I suppose that other schools of thought (or subsets of other schools) could be useful, and/or I might even be "using" these without tracing these to a specific author.

_sword 11y ago

Perhaps introducing them to a bit of philosophy bundled with a few good jokes would be helpful: http://existentialcomics.com/ http://existentialcomics.com/

spdionis 11y ago
This was awesome. Thank you :). http://existentialcomics.com/comic/13 http://existentialcomics.com/comic/13

aridiculous 11y ago

It's simply anti-intellectualism. It's part of the fabric of contemporary American culture that's being exported all over the world. Not sure there's an easy path out from this. Reading, education, book clubs may help. "Useful" must be released from the confines of just "Useful for the market economy".

spdionis 11y ago
I live in a post soviet country and I don't think it is so heavily influenced by American culture. I actually found European people to be much more open to such matters. Otherwise I agree with you.

cp9 11y ago

insight on the human condition. it doesn't play to a STEM crowd, but calling it anti-intellectualism is hilariously wrong. It's asking the whys that science can't answer. Science can answer "Why is the sky blue" science cannot answer "why are we here? what is the meaning of the thing we call life?"

Tomte 11y ago

Giving a home to branches of philosophy, until they have matured enough to be considered their own discipline. Mathematics, physics, theology, biology, sociology, just about science started out as a sub-field of philosophy.

kafkaesque 11y ago

> what is the usefulness of philosophy? This is kind of the wrong question to ask, if I may say so. Once you realise that everything that is not science is philosophy, philosophy doesn't only become interesting, but essential to living a worthwhile life. A Ph.D in the comments said s/he didn't like teaching college philosophy, and I think this is partly to blame for what Philosophy (with uppercase P) has become--people interpret philosophy as that subject you take in school with archaic, primitive ideas. Every major philosopher has probably only one good idea, yet they've wasted thousands of words trying to explain it or find a solution. This is what students spend most of the time studying, so it becomes tiresome. Philosophy is really critical thinking and understanding the various modes of logic/reasoning our brain chooses when acting consciously or subconsciously. Our lives are not one of pure deductive reasoning. However, you'd be surprised how many people (even scientists) use deductive reasoning. Once we understand that a brain holds different modes of reasoning at the same time, we learn to talk more openly, consider another point's of view more carefully, and attack our differences less so readily. In turn, this creates a better society--one which is based on understanding why and how we do things. The only real enemy of contemporary philosophy is tradition. And there are certainly many of those still around. But listen to a theistic philosopher speak and observe how he acts. Then listen to a dogmatic cult preacher in his multi-millionaire dollar celebrity church or from a celebrity religion. Tell me which one you prefer. Philosophy teaches us to be inquisitive but not naive. It softens our emotions when considering others' differences, because most of us hold views that neither science nor philosophy can explain. Yet, just like in science, pleasure does not come from knowing the answer, rather from searching for the enigma. (Edited to clarify some ideas.)