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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
by 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 agoAny epistemology is "actually quite hard to justify" (c.f. either René Descartes or Samuel Johnson's refutation of Berkeley's immaterialism).
- kijin 11y agoNo, I support a coherentist theory of justification. If you keep asking "why?" and end up running in circles, that's fine. What's important is to recognize that your beliefs depend on one another, and to be able to trace those dependencies. That way, if you ever need to update one of your beliefs, you will be able to follow the network and flag other beliefs that also need to be recompiled. Whether the dependencies are linear or circular doesn't matter.
- spdionis 11y agoThank you for your comment. I also always found that the interesting part is analyzing a philosopher's way of thinking based on the context he lived in and the other philosopher's arguments. Same with literature. Studying these things out of context is completely missing the point. > 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 This is a good way to put it. I also hated that philosophy crash course. I understand why my friends despise philosophy because of that. In fact I'm looking for arguments to simply redeem the idea of philosophy in their minds so they do not reject it immediately after hearing the word.