But what practical use is that? There has been a lot of academic waffle so far in answers to my question, but as yet not one person has come up with a practical application for philosophy.

well you are the horse and philosophy is the water.

Know thyself, it is a practical practice to practice; you apply it to living or not which seems to be your need of choice.

You are just refusing to see it's practicality, good for you.

So learning about how your mind works is not practical to you? I can let you have that.

I am not refusing to do anything, I am merely asking for answers.
In my everydday life where I have to make decisions often very quickly, or to carry out practial tasks I can see no use for philosophy. My decisions are based on the real life experience of myself and others. My decisions are not based on some esoteric musings of a philosopher. (Some of whose musings are very suspect due to them in some cases suffering from brain rotting sexually transmitted disease.)

What exactly do you mean by "philosophy"? Are you saying you see no use in contemplating yourself and the world, or in other words, "philosophizing"? Or are you saying you see no practical application for the hordes of philosophy majors that spill out of university repeating a bunch of stuff they read?

Both.

I'm still trying to figure out why it needs a practical use? If practical application was the basis for a thing or subject's existence, then we'd be losing all sporting events, there would be no entertainment on radio or television (just advertising, because it's practical), no music...heck, we could even do away with fine dining, because all that is required from a practical viewpoint is that we eat something nutritious, it doesn't have to taste good to be practical...

Do you see any jump in reasoning here?

(1) I have no need for X
(2) therefore, no one has a need for X, in any circumstance

In order to show the uselessness of academic philosophy, you really need to establish that no person needs to develop skills in debate, or that some other discipline teaches this skill in greater detail.

Edit: isn't it a bit ironic that you are debating the usefulness of debate?

I fear everyone here may be missing the obvious. The fact is, papasmurf's philosophy is that philosophy has no practical use.

I have no practical use for papasmurfs philosophy.

I've seen quite a few answers so far that I thought were quite sensible and informative....but we all know what will happen. Papasmurf will move on to another forum and add this one to the list of from which he "as yet not got one sensible reply", and his very first post on the next forum will be this:

Hah, I wouldn't be surprised at that, though I have to agree with one aspect of what he says - there have been good answers supporting the idea of learning debate and critical thinking skills, but I haven't heard of a good answer for making philosophy a career. I'm not even sure if it's possible to be a "philosopher" without also being a professor, or a novelist, or something that is otherwise useful. However, if it is possible to spend your time writing long-winded academic essays that only get read by other philosophers, then I'm not sure exactly what the "usefulness" of such a career would be.

Why does it have to be a career to be practical? Everyday life requires one to be philosophical.

Definitely, I agree. Sorry, I think my post was pretty unclear. What I'm trying to say is that philosophy is something that is very useful in pretty much every aspect of life and work, but philosophy AS a career doesn't seem very practical to me. It seems like making a career out of something like spelling.

The only career its really practical in is teaching others how to have a career in it.

Exactly.

Then you have been asking in the wrong places, or simply don't understand the replies (you need to switch your brain into a slightly different mode than you may be used to). First of all, you need to understand that philosophy doesn't build machines, or anything of the sort. So if that's what you mean by "practical", then you can just forget about asking. Philosophy is about speculation, morals, ethics, extrapolation and interpolation. Once you understand that, you have a better chance of understanding the answers.

There are two answers that you are likely to get to your question.

First, the "Rhetorical nonsense" answers: "We discuss the meaning of meaning. The essence of essence. The meaning of essence. The essence of meaning. Blah, blah, blah..". These answers probably simply mean that the person you've asked simply doesn't know, and is trying to make it seem like they do.

Or someone will explain that philosophy is largely about asking the questions "What if ...?" and "Is it right to ...?", and trying to find, and understand, the answers. Essentially it means being objective enough to find subjective answers (even those you don't agree with) and their motivation, or trying to understand the context and background of answers you do not (at first) understand.

Case in point: Was it the right thing for the US to invade Iraq?

Republicans will (generally) say "Of course it was!", followed by a series of both valid and invalid reasons to do so.

The people against the war till (generally) say "Of course it wasn't!", followed by both valid and invalid reasons to not go to war.

Depending on which camp you belong you, you will probably agree with one or the other, and side with the arguments. But is one of sides actually _right_, or _wrong_? Well, yes -- but depending on who you ask; there's no universal truth. But IF there WERE a universal truth to such a question, what would it be? More importantly; how "good" (by some rating) would that universal answer be?

The philosopher is interested in looking at the structure behind the arguments of both sides, weighing them against each other. (S)he will *strive* to make it a question of determining if value_of_arguments(A) is greater, smaller or equal to value_of_arguments(B). As you understand, there's no way to quantify opinions, morals and ethics in a way that makes sense in the real world. But [the idea is that] good philosophers are better at it than Average Joe.

For me, as a mathematician, I think of the philosophers role in the following terms: In mathematics you can use extrapolation to "guess" how something will work in the "future", given the known behavior up to a certain point in time. Or you can use interpolation to fill the gaps in a system with some known data; but where you have parts "missing". The philosopher does the same thing, but for extremely odd graphs (which essentially are arguments in the context of a question), with really weird variables such as "according to ethics x" and "according to morals y".

A mathematician is trained to solve equations. A (good) philosopher is trained to see both sides of an argument, and weigh them against each other. Now here's the big problem: If you don't see that as practical, then you simply can not understand the answer.

But, if you want know what they actually _do_ (as working philosophers), there are several fields. Sometimes, they are invited to news shows to discuss implications of choices made by governments. They may be hired by people within the legal system to write "for" and "against" arguments with regards to suggested changes in a law.

In Sweden, some politician realized that the average age of students in Swedish universities is higher than in the rest of Europe. Apparently, that is cause for alarm. (Don't ask, I don't understand these people). Well, as a solution, this politician came up with an idea. "Young people will receive extra points when applying to universities".

Had this politician asked a (good) philosopher about this idea, (s)he would have replied "Do you realize that you are effectively _punishing_ the (older) people who decided to wait a few years before attending the university?". This is a very simple example, and in this case it was rather about a really daft politician than something that required a philosopher to understand. But that is the philosophers role -- finding angles to questions, finding the arguments for and against choices, and weighing them against each other.

IMHO some people are natural philosophers, and don't need any training. They have what you call "common sense".


As a side note: When I studied Automata Theory, there was a guy there who'd taken philosophy courses, including courses in logic, and it was pretty noticeable -- he was very adept at spotting contradictions in the systems we were working with. We had an assignment; to attempt to show that a homeomorphism to a DFA exists, and we had to explain what it would mean. All we got was a definition of a homeomorphism, and the basic structure of a DFA. The guy who'd studied philosophy was one of two people who "solved" the assignment, and I can (safely) say that it was due to his training in logic.

So, does the philosophers "practical" work make more sense to you now?

But couldn't something similar could be said of most any academic discipline? To "do" or to "teach?"

Personally, I'm a software engineer and I think there's a lot of overlap with my degree (abstract analysis and symbolic logic is especially handy). I'd argue that a degree in computer science is in fact what's totally useless, since all the information one needs is online, for free, and is obsolete in 5 years anyway!

More thoughts on non-academic careers:
Publications: A NON-ACADEMIC CAREER?

The Philosophy Major's Handbook

I think that you are quite right in that philosophy is very useful in many different fields. All I'm saying is that philosophy AS a field is a self-perpetuating cycle. I've had some arguments with philosophy majors, and while they were good at word play and naming fallacies, they were lacking a lot of knowledge about the topic at hand and so they didn't really have anything to base the argument on. If you're going to argue about science, you need to know a little more than high school level science. If all you ever study is the art of arguing, you miss out on the facts required to build a good argument.

Totally agree, yaaarrrgg.

Very obviously from your answer there is no practical use for philosophy.