Oh man.
I agree.
When does the philosopher feed the hungry?
Where is the road that the philosopher paved or the bridge that he built?
Which sufferer in pain was nursed by the philosopher?
Does a philosopher get your dead car running again?
Can a philosopher heat your house in a power outage?
How many research foundations are funded by philosophers?
How many recording studios are run by philosophers?
Tell the needy, the hungry, the destitute, the sick and the downtrodden that the philosopher will be 'round to help them.
Yeah ... right.
Jim
Jim,
Has it not occurred to you that none of those things would matter or happen if we had no reason to take any of those actions?
If you advocated helping the needy, the downtrodden, the hungry, the destitute, the sick…, what would be your reason?
Surely you would have some reason to motivate such an action, right?
Now you may or may not have thought it through thoroughly. There’s a good chance that like most of us you are making some unexamined assumptions along the way, just the way audio subjectivists are aware of some of their unexamined assumptions that are worth pointing out.
We want good reasons for what we do right?
The fact is you are going to inevitably be treading into philosophical waters in trying to have a good reason for helping the needy or doing anything else. Good philosophical reasoning leads to those good reasons and increase the foundation for why you ought to do any of that, and also helps you not make other important mistakes that can lead to deleterious actions.
I mean, if for instance someone is asked “ Why take care of a sick person?” And the response is “ because it just feels like the right thing to do” then that’s problematic.
Because validating that principal would also validate plenty of the awful things people have done because “ it felt like the right thing to do.” Slavery once felt natural to many people. So did racism. Feelings against interracial marriage, and countless other things we’ve been able to correct overtime.
It’s by digging down and examining assumptions and intuitions, the the meat of philosophical inquiry… whether you are calling it philosophy or not… that we uncover our inconsistencies or poorly justified assumptions, which allows us to course correct.
If you are for instance, in a western country like the USA, much of the nature of your society, laws, politics, rights, ethical concerns, etc. arose from the input of philosophical thinking, as well as from particular philosophers. You’ve got democracy that goes right back to the ancient Greeks philosophers, notions about a Republic from Roman philosophers and expanded upon later by philosopher is like John Locke. You’ve got the role that Locke and others like John Stewart Mill played in developing liberalism and constitutionalism.
You have the influence on theories of government from philosophers like Hobbes and Rousseau. You’ve got the contribution of ethical theories from Bentham and Mill and others.
All this stuff did not just stay stuck in people musing from an armchair. It literally helped shape the world you are living in.
This very forum ultimately relies on many principles that were promulgated during the philosophical movement called The Enlightenment, which helped advance the role of science in society.
So to be on a forum like this questioning the worth of philosophy and philosophers is like a fish swimming in water saying “ who needs water?”
Finally, the idea that philosophers are not actually doing real good in the world is naïve. I’m sorry to say. Plenty of philosophers have motivated ethical movements that did real work in the world.
For instance, the Australian philosopher Peter Singer. One can argue with ethical theories, but in terms of the real world, he has been hugely influential in pushing people to work for all sorts of goods, from animal rights to human rights, to all sorts of organizations that fight poverty, to sponsoring all sorts of charity initiatives that are doing real work in the world, etc.
Singer himself has been contributing 15% of his income for many years to charities and has been upping that amount to now he’s giving something like 30% of his income to help others.
I don’t know about you, but that’s more than I give to charity! And he is certainly devoted far more of his life to promoting or advocating for charities than anybody I know. There are quite a number of other contemporary philosophers who would fit that bill as well.
So to wrap things up,
while I am no expert on this myself, nonetheless I think your take on philosophers and the worth of their work is just a tad… superficial. ;-)
