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SplodyPants t1_j8dp52b wrote

This is more of a meta philosophy question so I hope it's ok but: How do you handle the age old "philosophy isn't important" kind of remarks? The people who think all of philosophy is just "are we dreaming right now?" And "if a tree falls in the forest...." kind of questions. I've heard very intelligent people make comments like this and I usually present them with the same annoying math remarks like, "when am I going to use this?". Mathematitians usually answer that with the fact that we use math everyday in any number of applications. Philosophy is the same way. Everytime we try to determine if something is right, or good we use it. When we try to examine something unknown with objectivity we use it. When we use logic of any kind we use it to some degree. It just never seems to stick, though. At best I get a sort of, "yeah, ok hippy. That's very deep." kind of response. It's like many people think science and philosophy are at odds with one another when that couldn't be more untrue. They work in conjunction with eachother in the pursuit of knowledge. I just can't seem to get that across very easily.

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Giggalo_Joe t1_j8e27b3 wrote

This is kinda a standard university topic. One I haven't been asked in decades. Put simply, there are many possible answers but a couple of the more prominent ones are:

  1. Philosophy teaches you how to think, how to see the important questions in any problem solving exercise. Once you begin to think like a philosopher, many every day problems will become easier to solve. You may even find yourself helping others with problems they have languished over for a long time and privately wonder why they didn't come to the same conclusion long before. And this teaching you how to think is an excellent foundation for politics, medicine, law, any kind of research position and a great many other professions.

  2. Philosophy is the foundation of all knowledge, in all topics. Science is nothing more than applied philosophy. Quite often philosophy is thought of as the asking of questions but not answering them. And for some, this is all they ever want philosophy to be. But it can be more if you want it to. Ex: You have two competing ideas that can be thought of as two roads diverging in a wood. You arrive at the fork in the road and stand there wondering which direction to go. Without being able to see the end of either road, it is difficult to say which is the correct path. So you can a) conduct observations and see what factors may lead you to choose one versus the other, b) gather information from those who may be traveling down the same road and see which is has been observed to be the more likely correct path, or c) you can simply choose to walk a path and by walking it find an answer for right or wrong. All three of these are the foundation of all scientific study in all fields.

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DoctorDream614 t1_j8kr4sq wrote

But what if all the choices we have arn't either right or wrong they just exist to be used if someone decides too that route. It's like the question of is evil real and is good and kindness real we say certain things are evil but that's just something the majority of pp have come to except as evil there is neither good nor bad theirs just our perception of actions that tells us what's good and bad. Killers think nothing is wrong with their actions and how can that be if evil does exis cuz evil would have self knowledge of it being the wrong thing to do but a lot of cereal killers see no wrong In their actions is it really kindness and good to feed ur dog everyday or is it just a agreed upon that he gives u satisfaction so u give him satisfaction back by feeding him

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Giggalo_Joe t1_j8lslcf wrote

Do killers think nothing is wrong or do they simply not care? Everything is black or white. Everything is right or wrong. Every question has an answer. Whether we can ever know these things...that is another question.

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slickwombat t1_j8euqkx wrote

Basically, philosophy as an area of study encompasses a number of important problems. For example, what we can know or how we know stuff, or how we should behave and judge the behaviour of others. Such things are foundational to all kinds of human endeavour and even our regular lives.

There's different ways we might go about dealing with such problems. We can try to ignore them, and maybe just rely on received wisdom or prevailing cultural attitudes. Or we might idly speculate and come up with answers that seem pleasant or particularly in accord with our intuitions. Or we might pray, meditate, take a lot of hallucinogenics, etc. and see if any answers reveal themselves to us. These might all work out fine for us if we're just looking to get on with life and not trouble ourselves with such matters, but they probably aren't satisfactory if we want to know what's actually true. So the alternative is philosophy as a discipline: attempting to work out these problems in a rigorous and critical way.

Usually when people are dismissive of philosophy it's because they either don't understand that rigor can be applied to these kinds of problems, or just think that philosophy isn't about doing that (e.g., that it's the "idle speculation" approach).

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HeinrichWolfman t1_j8f15ls wrote

In such instances, it's best to ignore them. You can't really prove the importance of philosophy to someone who doesn't care. I might go a step further and say that their primary agenda is to ridicule you and make you feel bad. That's usually their primary focus.

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jamesj t1_j8f6mls wrote

For working scientists and engineers, philosophical mistakes often lead to logical and mathematical mistakes, which affect outcomes.

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