So I came across a
juvenile, fallacy-ridden article today that nonetheless got me thinking. Is philosophy still relevant to humanity and its pursuit of... whatever it's pursuing?
I mean this question kind of begs another question: 'what is it that humanity ought to pursue?' and 'what, IN FACT, is humanity pursuing right now?" is one part of philosophy: the ethics. 'The rest' of philosophy deals with clarifying the relationships between propositions. That is, "how does our knowledge of facts relate to what we ought to pursue" and even "how do we decide what is a fact". The scientific method (principles of falsifiability, etc) conceived by Popper, for example, came out of a definitely 'philosophical' discourse: analytic philosophy (frege, russell, quine, wittgenstein, carnap, etc).
If so, in what ways is it relevant, and in what ways do people believe it's relevant when it's not? I don't want to get too much into my personal opinions on the matter in this post, because I feel like when I do that, I might as well be writing a blog post and I don't intend on doing that. I will say that I understand why a scientist would tell university students to avoid philosophy if possible. Academic philosophy as a whole seems to have a nasty tendency of legitimizing lines of thought that have long since been rendered unproductive and obsolete. That isn't to say I don't respect philosophy at all, because I think that philosophy has been tremendously helpful at times. I just think that it's too easy for some line of thought to define itself as a "philosophy" based on an appearance of rigour alone, and through this get special treatment over other lines of thought.
I am biased, as someone who studies philosophy, but I think the practice of clarifying the relationship between propositions is a fundamental part of any discipline. Philosophy becomes 'dangerous' (useless/unproductive/obsolete) when it moves very far from an object of study. I study philosophy of pyschology and philosophy of education primarily, and I do have 'positive' critiques of real educational practices and procedures that are grounded in philosophy (mindfulness practices such as breathing exercises have been recently shown to reduce behavior problems significantly). I also use findings from psychology to discuss the philosophical notion of agency, which is a pre-condition in many ethical theories for responsibility. I think the most productive theories come out of looking at concrete situations and then building theory to explain those situations without taking those situations as necessary or given. There are sort of 2 parts: 1 part is explaining a concrete situation, the other part is asking 'is there some part of my understanding of this situation that could be biased by my subjectivity.' You need both explanation of objects and explanations about interpretation. I remain committed to the belief that one can understand differences in perception if they are careful.
Also the study of
politics is a better target for criticism than philosophy, in terms of a debate on the utility of a field IMO.
EDIT:
Compared to philosophy, it is very easy to determine if someone is performing science properly: it's possible.
If the research is significant enough, people will attempt to replicate it.
This is as opposed to a field like philosophy, where I'm not really sure what a criticism would be. Perhaps it's not interesting enough. Perhaps its scope is too small, or too large? How do you distinguish quality philosophizing from poor philosophizing?
Perhaps by examining how completely a method can explain an object? For example, E.P. Thompson wrote
The Making of the English Working Class by analyzing how associations among laborers in England led to their articulation of class identities. Other works start by taking class identities for granted, and then looking at how different classes associated during a given time period. The former method looks at how associations produce class identities, the latter takes class identities for granted and proceeds with an analysis of associations (in fact the latter method is quite common in statistical economics i would imagine: first define classes using income levels, then look at which direction money tends to go in interactions between classes.). There are different methods to explaining phenomena, to writing history, to telling a story. The best methods are those that yield the most complete account of phenomena , while also suggesting possible applications, in the form of changes to procedures, towards widely varying ends (utility, 'the good', and emancipation are examples of some suggested ends). So I don't understand what you mean: methods, or arguments, will be replicated if they are 'significant enough', whether in science or philosophy.
You may want to make your distinction between philosophy and science clearer, because I would think of history as philosophy, sociology as philosophy, International relations as philosophy. I say these are philosophy even though they have empirical ways of gathering information (like science) because the evidence in these disciplines requires more nuanced interpretation (than what would be needed to interpret a chemical reaction) to avoid fallacy, clarifying the relationships between propositions (philosophy) becomes a massive part of such discourses.
If you mean something else by philosophy (like ethics or 'the study of ends'), then I would find it difficult to argue against what you say. It seems that the good is pretty subjective, and that so far no account of morality has been satisfactory. I sort of cling to what Nietzsche imagined, which is something like 'the value of values must itself be assessed, and if we find that the promotion of a certain good turns out to in fact
be bad, we ought to discard it'. I guess this sort of could be taken to say that we should be ever skeptical of morality. For example, people maybe used to say that slavery was good because the bible allowed it, and the bible was the word of god so it was the good. The practice of granting ethical authority to the bible was rightly called into question.
