What Makes Philosophy Worthwhile?

When I was much younger, chicks really thought I was deep when I philosophised about the Pre Raphealites.

The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find, as we saw in our opening chapters, that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.

Even if intellectual speculation has at times led to bizarre doctrines and monstrous conclusions, we cannot but have a certain sympathy for and interest in the struggle of the human intellect to attain Truth. Kant, who denied that Metaphysics in the traditional sense were or could be a science, none the less allowed that we cannot remain indifferent to the objects with which Metaphysics professes to deal, God, the soul, freedom; and we may add that we cannot remain indifferent to the human intellect's search for the True and the Good.

But we may add that Science generally pales in the presence of Philosophy, Art, and Religion, as a generator of meaning.

Chumly: "I agree, but it does beg the question of innate meaning versus the presumption of meaning".

Right, Chumly, meaning is itself a philosophical--but not a scientific--problem. I see meaning as never "innate" or given. It is always a matter of human (cultural and personal) construction. And that's why it is at the heart of the humanistic disciplines: philosophy, art, and religion, principally forms of human creation. Science results from both construction and discovery (I'm thinking of its mathematical and empirical bents)

....in almost every phase of the development of science we are under the sway of metaphysical - that is, untestable - ideas; ideas which not only determine what problems of explanation we shall choose to attack, but also what kinds of answers we shall consider as fitting or satisfactory or acceptable, and as improvements of, or advances on, earlier answers.