For any of you reading this post, you likely have some interest in philosophy, otherwise you wouldn’t have clicked on here. Why are you interested in philosophy? Is it a pastime? Is it something you want to pursue in the future? You most likely have a natural curiosity about the world.
Now, let’s ask an important question–why? Why do we study philosophy? The first answer is because we like to, obviously. But what about why we should study philosophy? Is there actually any benefit to it? Well, I’m going to attempt to answer this question based off of my personal opinion and what I know about philosophy, so get ready.
The first thing we have to remember is that philosophy is a bunch of different topics mashed together, because philosophy is really just about unanswerable questions. There are basically 5 parts to philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and logic. So, let’s start with metaphysics.
Metaphysics is the study of what actually exists. It can come down to idea like the Theory of Forms or even ideas like multiverses which we can’t prove through empirical science. It can also talk about ideas like the 4th dimension. So, why should we study this? Let’s look at this through the idea of application. If metaphysics can be applied to useful things to humanity, it must therefore be useful to humanity. If it is useful, then we “should” study metaphysics. So, what can we apply metaphysics to?
Well, to be honest, I don’t think you can apply it to anything. The problem with questioning reality is that questioning it doesn’t really change anything. Sure, we can question whether reality is a simulation, but that doesn’t change empirical science. Gravity still exists within our view of reality, and so does everything else. So, even if there is some absolute truth about the world, it won’t change the way we live.
Speaking about what we can see, let’s talk about epistemology, the study of knowledge. This topic deals with things like introspection, the limits of human knowledge, and how we think (inductive/deductive reasoning). Can we apply these ideas to real life?
Yes, we can! Now, the problem is that there’s also not too much here as well. For example, introspection is also used in psychology, an empirical science, and has real life applications. Knowing how we think is pretty important. However, the more abstract topics like the limits of human knowledge, our conscious is the only thing we can know to be real, etc. are all not very applicable. So, the more empirical parts of it, which apply to psychology and possibly neurology, are useful.
Ethics is where philosophy becomes actually very important and applicable. Ethics is self-explanatory: what is right and what is wrong, or what is moral and what is not. This may seem stupid, but it’s VERY important within today’s society. It’s not just important because we need everyone to be their best selves, because that’s somewhat unrealistic. It’s important because it is the basis of political philosophy. Socialism, Communism, Democracy, Liberalism, all of these political ideologies have an ethical basis. They are all the “right” thing to do, according to one person or another. Without ethical philosophy, people would not be able to create a proper societal structure. That’s why ethics is really important. When discussing policy making or other parts of law, like the death penalty, you have to take into account ethics. It is the fundamental backbone of society.
For logic, it’s even easier to explain why. Logic is essentially the basis of mathematics, and mathematics are extremely important to engineering and the development of future technology. Logic essentially talks about deductive reasoning; what we can assume to be true and what conclusions we can draw from it. It’s basically just doing a mathematical proof. Without logic, we wouldn’t have a solid basis for math, so clearly logic is important.
The final topic is aesthetics. This is concerned with arts. Now, I don’t have too much to say about this either mainly because I haven’t researched it. But in my opinion, this should be equally as important as the previous two. Humans are naturally drawn to art, and understanding what we like and don’t like is important to creating and understanding art. Clearly, there’s a reason we like certain entertainment more than others, like how we prefer certain movies and dislike certain other ones. Without aesthetics, it would be difficult to discern why we do this.
Now, after covering this, I think I can say philosophy is pretty important. 3 of the 5 branches are very important. However, let me clarify that just because epistemology and metaphysics don’t have scientific applications, I wouldn’t say they’re unimportant. I do think that in terms of human advancement, really abstract questions like the existence of a god, whether honesty is moral, and others are just kind of useless. Sure, they’re interesting questions to think about, but they don’t really contribute to anything because at the end of the day, they’re unanswerable questions. We as humans just don’t have the ability to answer them. You can discuss it as much as you want, and it may be fun, but in the end, you don’t get any valuable information because you get no answer. However, on the opposite side, in a manner like Socrates, the questions themselves might be more important than the answer. When you ask questions like this that you know you can’t answer, you’re encouraging critical thinking, curiosity, and looking further into things we think are obvious. Even if you will never know the answer to some questions, the thought process can be used for questions that do have a clearer answer. So, we do need people to think about metaphysics and epistemology more abstractly. Even if they don’t contribute to science, they contribute to a world where everyone is encouraged to think for themselves. That is possibly more important than any advancement we could ever make.