Philosophy for Daily Life

I mentioned in my last post that I'm an equal-opportunity critic. It's now philosophy's turn to play the whipping boy, though with the tremendous admiration science garners in our society, this is a bit like asymmetric warfare.

The New York Times recently asked two philosophers to defend philosophy from the criticism that philosophers are too far removed from the daily lives of most people. Both answered with lengthy essays. The first ended up being a discussion of the proper level of abstraction and complexity in philosophy. The second could be summarized as a short biography of Plutarch that attempts to argue that philosophy should be fun and should be practiced at dinner parties. If you feel like wasting your time, you can read the essays at a post titled (apparently without conscious irony) Lost in the Clouds.

Now, both essays did say some thing that were true, but neither actually addressed the criticism which they were supposed to address. I think this is, to a large degree, what is wrong with Philosophy. That is, if you ask a philosopher a question, he may say a lot of things, some portion of which may end up being either true or interesting, but he's unlikely to actually answer your question. This by no means is a problem confined to these essays. My personal experience having essentially double majored in Philosophy is that American Philosophy departments are full of people who like to argue about things, who are impressed by the cleverness of the mental loops they can execute, but who can't actually answer any questions or address any problems. In particular I've seen a disturbing tendency to argue about what a specific word means when it's obvious to everyone that words have multiple meanings. As a specific example, I took a class where we spent a whole semester reading philosophers who were trying to give a single, unifying definition to the word good such that it would have the same meaning when you said "good dog", "he does good", "he is a good friend", or "this food tastes good". The professor was so lost in the trees, he couldn't see that these philosophers he so admired were making a mistake a fifth grader would catch.

Now, I'm not one of those who feels he can criticize without offering an alternative. While the real answer is far beyond the scope of a blog post (I have a finished 7000 word essay on the purpose of the humanities which I may extend into a book someday), I can offer some pointers here as to the right direction. To that end, there are a number of great moral questions in our society that are becoming more pressing but which continue to go unaddressed. What is the best way to use money, when do you have too much, and what should you do with the extra? Given the other needs in our society, how much is it worth to add one year to the end of our lives and who should make the decision about when to pay and when to stop paying for treatments? If philosophers began to address these and many other practical, thorny, and important questions, they would gain more respect in society. In addition, our society dreadfully needs to be educated on how to spot arguments with logical fallacies and arguments made in bad faith, areas that philosophers are uniquely qualified to address, and not coincidentally, areas I'll touch on a good bit on this blog.