What Makes Philosophy Worthwhile?

Chumly and JLN,

This is how Karl Popper explained the importance of philosophy for science:

Quote:

....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.

I am not as sanguine as (perhaps?) you re: justification.

Witness magnetism - even after centuries of science, magnetism remains dimly seen, poorly understood and mostly unknown; however the applied effects of magnetism in our modern world are huge! Or am I on the wrong track here?

How does a person go about thinking? I shall offer a few suggestions in this introduction. Help of this kind, however, is necessarily of limited value. Much of the trying nature of thoughts results from the impossibility of thinking according to teachable techniques. Although much is said about "teaching students to think," a teacher can do little more than offer encouragement and criticism. The appearance of an idea is a mysterious occurrence, and it is doubtful that anyone does, or ever will, understand just how it happens.

But a student can learn to think. My reason for saying that no one can be taught to think is to focus at the outset on the dependence of the entire process on the student's own solitary efforts. It is both the glory and the burden of thought that it is an exceedingly personal undertaking. The solitude of the mature thinker must be entered into immediately by the beginner. As the mature thinker thinks all alone, the beginner must learn to think all alone. Occasionally one may receive a gift of encouragement or useful criticism, but nothing is decided by these gifts. Everything depends on the capacity for solitary effort.

It follows that little instruction in the art of thinking can be offered beyond suggestions such as the following.

1. Do not try to arrive at ideas no one has ever thought of before. Even the greatest thinkers have rarely done that. The aim of thinking is to discover ideas that pull together one's world, and thus one's being, not to give birth to unprecedented conceptions. An idea is your own if it has grown by your own efforts and is rooted in your own emotions and experience, even though you may have received the seeds from someone else and even though the idea may be very much like ideas held by many others.

2. Be open. Ideas cannot be deliberately produced like industrial products. They appear uncommanded, they occur, as we recognize when we say, "It occurred to me that..." You place yourself in a fundamentally wrong relationship with ideas if you assume you can control their appearance. You can only be open to them.

3. Do not hurry. Initial efforts to think about a problem are often completely frustrating. They may best be regarded as a tilling of the ground; time is required before anything can be expected to grow.

4. Make plenty of notes. It is easier to work with your mind if you are doing some corresponding work with your hands. It is often helpful to make notes on large pads where there is room for sketching out patterns of ideas. It can also be helpful to make notes on cards and then to cut up the cards so that each idea is on a small piece of card. These can then be laid out on a desk and rearranged. Often this process suggests new connections among your thoughts.

5. Beware of substituting reading for thinking. Reading about the thoughts of others is not the same as having thoughts of your own. To be sure, to engage in thinking you need some acquaintance with the thoughts of others. The great thinkers inspire, provoke, confirm, and in other ways help you do your own thinking. But to think you must at some point lay down the book and strike out on your own.

Specifically, philosophy means and includes five fields of study and discourse: logic, aesthetics, ethics, politics and metaphysics.

Logic is the study of ideal method in thought and research: observation and introspection, deduction and induction, hypothesis and experiment, analysis and synthesis -- such are the forms of human activity which logic tries to understand and guide. It is a dull study for most of us, and yet the great events in the history of thought are the improvements men have made in their methods of thinking and research.

Aesthetics is the study of ideal form, or beauty. It is the philosophy of art.

Ethics is the study of ideal conduct. The highest knowledge, said Socrates, is the knowledge of good and evil, the knowledge of the wisdom of life.

Politics is the study of ideal social organization (it is not, as one might suppose, the art and science of capturing and keeping office). Monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, socialism, anarchism, feminism -- these are the dramatis personae of political philosophy.

And finally, metaphysics (which gets into so much trouble because it is not, like the other forms of philosophy, an attempt to coordinate the real in the light of the ideal) is the study of the "ultimate reality" of all things: of the real and final nature of "matter" (ontology), of "mind" (philosophical psychology) and of the interrelation of "mind" and "matter" in the processes of perception and knowledge (epistemology).

-- Will Durant, "The Pleasures of Philosophy"

We live in two worlds: (1) the sensible world of the common perceptual objects that we move around and use in various ways and (2) the intelligible world of ideas, the common objects of thought that we cannot touch with our bodies or perceive with our senses, but that, as thinking individuals, we can discuss with one another.

-- Mortimer J. Adler

If we survey early Greek philosophy with a modern scientific eye, certain pieces of it look familiar. The pre-Socratic inquiry into the shape and arrangement of the cosmos, its origin, or its fundamental ingredients reminds us of questions still investigated in modern astrophysics, cosmology, and particle physics. However, other pieces of early philosophy look considerably more foreign. Working scientists today do not inquire whether change is logically possible or where true reality is to be found; and it would be a considerable feat to turn up, say, a physicist or chemist who worries about how to balance the respective claims of reason and observation. These matters are no longer talked about by scientists. Does it follow that the early philosophers who devoted their lives to such questions were "unscientific," perhaps even misguided or dim-witted?

....Themes such as the identity of the ultimate reality, the distinction between natural and supernatural, the source of order in the universe, the nature of change, and the foundations of knowledge are quite different from the explanation of small-scale observational data (say, the descent of a heavy body, a chemical reaction, or a physiological process) that have occupied scientists for the past few centuries; but to be different is not to be insignificant. At least until Isaac Newton, these larger themes demanded as much attention from the student of nature as did the problems that now fill up a university course in science. Such questions were interesting and essential precisely because they were part of the effort to create a conceptual framework and a vocabulary for investigating the world. There were foundational questions; and it is often the fate of foundational questions to seem pointless to later generations who take the foundations for granted. Today, for example, we may find the distinction between the natural and supernatural obvious; but until the distinction was carefully drawn, the investigation of nature could not properly begin.

From: The Beginnings of Western Science, David C. Lindberg

Philosophy is not, I think, a body of truths, but a way of thinking and living. It might not make you happy - but it does embody that
courageous openness and questioning that is perhaps the noblest feature of human beings.

Without philosophy, as far as one's basic beliefs are concerned one will just end up believing what one is given. The duty of a philosopher is
to free people to think for themselves.

-John Shand

The duty of a philosopher is
to free people to think for themselves.

No one can think for you.....

Debates on issues of philosophy are often protracted and often fail to reach a decisive resolution. What is it, then, that makes philosophy worthwhile?

The essential characteristic of philosophy, which makes it a study distinct from science, is criticism. It examines critically the principles employed in science and in daily life; it searches out any inconsistencies there may be in these principles, and it only accepts them when, as the result of a critical inquiry, no reason for rejecting them has appeared.

-Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

Philosophy is fun: it makes life a theoretical problem, and, as such, a source of joy and object of wonder.