My Say

What is the Use of Philosophy?

TO ASK WHAT THE USE OF PHILOSOPHY IS is like asking what the use of understanding is. One answer is that understanding is something that we very often seek for its own sake. As Aristotle said long ago: “All human beings by nature desire to understand.” We are curious if nothing else, and it is one of the more admirable traits of human beings. We like to know what is going on and why. After we have fed ourselves and put a roof over our heads, and attended to other basic needs, the question arises what we are to do with our time. One suggestion is that we should raise our heads a bit and look around us and try to understand ourselves and things around us. This turns out to be interesting. It is the genesis of both science and philosophy, with science taking the more empirical road to understanding and philosophy the more conceptual. These are complementary enterprises and there have always been important connections between them which continue despite the growth of institutional science and its increasing splintering into more and more highly specialized sub-disciplines.

There are universities only because human beings are by their nature curious. Universities are centers of curiosity. They are repositories and preservers of the accumulated knowledge and understanding of humankind as well as the primary centers in the modern of world of the pursuit of pure inquiry, that is, inquiry for sake of slaking our thirst for understanding. Why is this valuable? Well, why is anything valuable? It is a