What practical use is philosophy?
I have asked this question on numerous internet forums since 1990.
I have as yet not got one sensible reply.

You can feel a feeling in your heart, express it, but can you give or promote your feeling to others? You cant. [may be you can share it.] Whats the use of feeling in your life.. how your life will be if you are a person without any feeling[if you are without kindness, love, laughter, crying]. You cant be..

Philosophy is a vessel, through which you take and share your wisdom with others. If your wisdom is water, then philosophy is the vessel. Each and every person in this world is a philosopher in his own way, and each differ in his/her own views. How much broad is your philosophy, that much wisdom you can have in it.. At a single moment, hundreds of thoughts originate and vanish in your human mind. Each of that hundred is a thought. And your mind, applies your own philosophy to each and every single thought that originate, and a very few thought become much meaningful, and become wisdom, and you become a wise person, and finally you are a great philosopher. So, you may be wise, but may not be a philosopher. It depends on you.

That is just the sort of etherial, unintelligble totally meaningless answer I usually get.
It does nothing to explain what practical use philosophy is.

Don't you rather mean telnet or mailing lists since the www has only been around since 1993.

On topic: I think the the practical use of philosophy is that it can work as a valve or even catalyser for expressions of mind.

We are blessed/cursed with our mind and philosophy gives as satisfaction, without satisfaction of any kind we would be much more aggressive and lonely.

I think the word itself is very selfexplanatory as it means love for wisdom. And we seek for wisdom.

I had a duoble major in math and philosophy. Between the two, I actaully use my philosophy training more on a day to day basis than my math background.

In a nutshell, analytic philosophy is the study of formal debate and critical thinking.

I suppose when you ask how it's practical you mean how can you make money?

People with philosophy degrees have an advantage in law school ...I think philosophy majors tend to score highest on the LSAT, aside from physics majors. I've heard that lawyers themselves try to exclude philosophy majors from juries, since they have formal training and might sway the entire jury. The basic line of reasoning is the same (constructing persusive arguments, finding fallacies, ethical reasoning, appeal to emotion), so the transition is fairly natural.

Also, it's a good background from anyone going into sales (which is basically just an applied form argument). I had one philosophy instructor that sold cars in grad school and made a ton of money.

On a quality of life in general, the better you are at constructing persuasive arguments, the more you will get your way.

Personally, I think the practical aspects are less important than the long term benefits to society as a whole. In Greece, philosophy was the subject that mathematics, science, political science, astronomy, and theology was born. Although, in the U.S. philosophy is viewed with disdain. IMO, it's because the nation has Christian roots, and the Bible has a hostile attitude towards people who think about things too much.

Assuming you live in the U.S. who do you think the founders of the country based their ideas on? Jefferson didn't just pull them out of thin air... he were largely influenced by Plato, Hobbes (on property rights) etc. That's right, a bunch of navel gazers.

Note: this reply is an example of applied philosophy ...

For me, philosophy is talking about reality in an abstracted sense. It is to devise a underlying ground on which practical decisions are to be based. It abstracts to remove distractions that exist in the practical realm of thinking.
It seeks the underlying assumptions, in metaphysics and ethics. In finding the underlying assumptions, one might find that they differ among different people and are the origin of disagreements. Knowing the origin helps discuss the disagreement, knowing assumptions uncovers ridiculous ones. Of course different reasoning can also lead to disagreements, because someone might be illogical, reason might be subjective, or there are still hidden assumptions.
This is one of the reasons that reasoning from the bible/koran/name is ridiculous, it does not treat assumptions at all, it even tries to proclaim its truth be telling the reader so.
Oh really? Can you help me understand/give your opinion about this http://socialdiscussion.com/civil-li...html#post79471 am i doing something wrong in trying to classify that way? Perhaps it is redundant, with the earlier classifications already being there and all. And perhaps trying to strip the discussion to only the purpose of the 'system of society' is somewhat unfair, because it does not deal with whether it is possible. No-one argued that, though.

I have to admit, I would tend to agree wih you, papasmurf. I'm am still mystified at the purpose of academic philosophy. I am an engineer, and I took a few philosophy courses because I needed arts credits and they seemed interesting, and I did very well in them. It was fun to spend time arguing with people, but I honestly didn't learn anything. The skills that were useful in the classes were skills that I already had, and in fact, I did better than most of the philosophy majors in the class.

One of our readings in one class (albeit a first year course) was Nagel's "What is it like to be a Bat?". I found it to be very verbose, and basically he was saying over and over again "I can imagine what it's like to be a person in a bat's body, but I can never know what it's like for a bat to be a bat". Okay, fine. It's good that you recognize different subjective viewpoints. But come on, this is someone's famous career-making project? I just don't see how that compares to, say, discovering the structure of DNA.

The thing that gets me about philosophy is that the kids who go into philosophy read a bunch of essays that were written by other philosophers, and if they decide to stick with the field, maybe they'll end up as a professor of philosophy writing essays for other philosophers to read. It seems to be a self-serving cycle that doesn't really affect people outside of the field. Why not just become a novelist and share your philosophical outlook that way?

I apologise to you philosophy students out there. This has just been my impression of the realm of academic philosophy, and I don't mean to offend you. It's just my subjective outlook.

I mean practical use. (I can see am going to have problems getting an answer as per usual).

Imho it is very practical that we can relieve ourselves.
It has the same satisfaction as the use of drugs, you won't build a house with that if that's your definiton of practical.

Sports for your mind. there are different physical sports and there are different mental sports.


You seem to have a very specific answer to that question yourself otherwise you wouldn't decline ours. So tell us please.

Well, if you reject all answers, then clearly you won't get any answers.

It depends on what you mean by philosophy. I consider philosophy to be a discussion about our beliefs of the fabric of the world. If actions come from belief (and I think they do) then philosophy is one of the most important things we could possibly talk about. My beliefs about philosophy affect every single thought and every single action. I agree that some people take it too far, and sometimes it degenerates into pretentious drivel, but that doesn't mean it always is.

Hmm, I took papasmurf's question to mean academic philosophy, as in making philosophy your career.

Well, it's the same as sports, there are people who watch others playing with a basketball or a bat and there are people who watch others, or rather read what you think.

You earn money in that case by doing stuff other people might find interesting and is good for your own health or mind.

the OP should really try to learn how to ask questions as this was very vague.

No offense, but this is kind of a silly question.

Personally, I've found the subject very usefull... not so much at lower level classes though. Other people will have different experiences of course.

But am I supposed to explain how a field is useful to you? Possibly it's useless to you. I've had the same debate with my brother ... except he always argued that Math was useless (he's more of an artistic-minded person).

Art/Music might also be useless for you as well. I have no idea what you are even trying to do (do you want to make widgets in a sweatshop?)

What do you think is practical?

There will never be an end to peoples desire to find the answers. And some people will never be satisfied with answers that are not their own. There will never be an end to philosophy. As for its value, if you ask me its vanity. Just a way people have of wasting time and pretending to have deep 3-dimensional personalities until they die. They really dont have a clue, just like everyone else.

The point of philosophy is not to find answers, but to understand critical thinking and debate.

I think this is why people don't see the value in it. The shell of the argument is a structure to be examined in it's own right. It doesn't matter what the conclusion is. We could study the philosophy of cheese, and sharpen debate skills on that. On a formal level, it's all the same.

I could go to the dictionary on philosophy, but i hate word wars. I think philosophy can create social discinctions or perhaps even prejudice in society. People have gone to war over less, some cultures have thought themselves better than others because of some twisted philosophy.

I think that's where I see a problem with formal philosophy. I agree that debate and argument are very important, but like I said, these are skills that can be easily learned without being a philosophy major. If it doesn't matter what you're debating, then why do people go on to become "philosophers" and spend their time pontificating on whether or not God exists, when they could be using these debate skills to actually make a difference in the world?

Fair enough... when I use the word 'philosophy', I generally mean:

Analytic philosophy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Are you without any philosophical view whatsoever?

Is all life merely practical?

Do you, or have you ever asked questions such as; 'who am I?' or, 'why am I here?', how about, 'What should I do now?'.

These are all philosophical questions. You have never asked any of these or other similar questions?

They all seem like practical questions to me at different stages in ones life.

Then again, if where you are stuck is in a cynical mindset, then not only philosophy, but most likely, not much of anything outside you makes a whole lot of practical sense.

Hey, philosophiclly speaking, 'whatever floats your boat'.

That's a fair point... in other subjects (math, science) debate and critical thinking are essential components. However they are not the focus of the field. In philosophy, this is the primary focus. One looks at hundreds, maybe thousands of arguments, of varying shades and colors, dissects them, rearranges them, fixes them, analyzing weak and strong points (to attack or fix). Like a mechanic with ideas.

I agree that you can learn some debate and logic from science class though ... but it's not the focus. Some subject needs to actually think about what's being thought about (and so on) and formalize it ... and that's what philosophy does. It's kinda like saying "let's get rid of math and just teach physics."

On a side note, just because someone is a philosophy major doesn't mean they know shit Philosophy is really a subject that is easy to criticize or engage in, but few people actually do it competently.

Since you are more science/mathematically minded, you'd probably enjoy the philosophy of science and symbolic logic better than the classes you took. I do think you have a talent for philosophy ... and that you took classes beneath your level of talent.