Philosophy, the understanding of logical principals, and the intellectual spirit to apply them to your life and actions is absolutely useful in this day and age. In a time of prosperity, we have room to think, we have the resources to do amazing things, and the problem comes in making a decision. How can we structure a society to maximize the progress towards the goals of it's constituents? How do our current goals mesh into goals of the society, and how can we determine these goals? I don't think it's useless to think about changing the status quo or think about ideas in a vacuum because the act of reasoning these things out creates a society which is culturally more able to handle problems, make quick decisions, and act on it's desires, even if it never ends up deviating far from the way it is now.
I actually agree with this general sentiment. I consider philosophy a very broad practice that practically everybody does in practice. Even the process of converting a mathematical model into a explanation of the phenomenon it's modelling could be considered an exercise in philosophy. I consider this an aspect of philosophy that is relevant and always will be.
The problem happens when people try to make philosophy into an ivory tower. Either you're rigorous or you're wrong. I agree with myzozoa that rigour is very important, but having a rigorous framework doesn't make you right. It just means you're staking everything on a specific foundation of principles. It could also simply mean that the subject matter has been discussed for a very long time, which is the case for philosophy of religion, for example. I just think that too many philosophical frameworks sell themselves solely on internal consistency.
My other problem is when people worship philosophers of the past as the end-all-be-all of all human thought. To address Soul Fly's posts on this: Newton is revered as a great scientist
of his time. Many consider him the greatest scientist-of-his-time of all time. However, by today's standards he's not an authority on, well, anything. His view of the universe is merely a stepping stone, either to engineering applications or as preparation for the more modern theories, which are more accurate but more difficult to learn. Contrast this with the attitudes of many "philosophy fans" (as billymills put it) toward philosophers of the past. They're treated as if they've already achieved the pinnacle of what they're talking about. That simply isn't healthy.
the notion of thought having to be somehow "productive" is entirely a STEM notion. the act of thought is an exercise in and of itself and imo deserves to be studied even if it doesn't lead to some arbitrarily-defined "scientific progress".
But my standard isn't "scientific progress". My standard is applicability. Discussion of undetectable dragons in garages is
necessarily not applicable to anything. If it could be applied, then the dragon would be detectable through the application. Similarly, discussion of abstract societies that more closely resemble cave dwellers than civilizations is not applicable to a civilization. It just reflects a lack of recognition that we already tried the "natural state" for the vast majority of human history, and it wasn't pretty. Finally, discussion of concepts that we trick ourselves into believing are well-defined when they're not is not applicable to anything. All such discussion does is to trap people in thought-terminating cliches.
I just "called out" three very real approaches to philosophy advanced by very real people whom really are generally considered philosophers.
I agree that thinking about deep stuff and clarifying language are important endeavours and I kind of thought I provided enough evidence on this forum that I at least read up on philosophy sometimes. I have a problem when people merely believe that they're talking about something SUPER DEEP when they're just regurgitating arguments that have, on some occasions, been rendered silly and nonsensical.
As an example:
They address different questions, but too many people wrap themselves up in pitting them as opposing forces because it's so much easier to ignore morals and ethics by assaulting the rationality of the person proposing said morals/ethics rather than wrestling with the moral/ethical implications themselves. On the flipside, it's easier to call people Godless heathens than it is to process and adapt to new information about the way the world functions. The former impulse is much more prevalent in today's society.
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The unmoved mover / first cause is a better philosophical basis for the existence of a God than the alternative view that nothingness gave rise to substance and, subsequent to that already mighty stretch, chaos gave rise to order - especially since all observed systems break down over time rather than become more resilient. I don't have enough faith to believe the laws of the universe as we understand them just decided one day to reverse themselves and trend towards order for a while.
It seems that by "how" and "why" you're trying to distinguish questions about the universe from questions about morality and ethics. Yet there's no reason for the two to be distinct. Aspects of human biology and psychology inform most if not all of human morality. Some people don't like that answer because it boils morality down to a matter of preference, but so what? Are people so unwilling to think of morality like that that they'd rather just declare that there must be an objective moral agent out there? (Side note: I've cleared up for myself what most people mean by "objective" and "subjective" since I posted on the subject.) To be frank, it often
is the case that the teachings of a religion and/or religious denomination conflict with known facts. In such situations, who's really the one ignoring moral and ethical implications?
As for the first cause: I assume you mean the cosmological argument, which starts with the premise that everything that begins to exist has a cause. There are so many things wrong with this argument. I've seen a few different approaches to refuting it, including the distinction between creation ex nihilo and creation ex materia. But I think my favourite refutation is from Sean Carroll, who pretty much describes how the first premise is
not even false because the language used is outdated and meaningless in the context of our modern understanding of the universe. The cosmological argument amounts to little more than an abuse of language, and the incredulity of the view that "nothingness gave rise to substance" (whatever that means) is no better. This kind of thing is a textbook example of what I've been talking about in this post. And you even take it one step further by misusing the second law of thermodynamics.