What use is philosophy?

Today I received my copy of Philosophy Now (Issue 131, April/May 2019), a UK based periodical I subscribe to.

Leafing through its pages, I came across the Letters section and saw my name. I had written a letter that I had forgotten about. It was in response to an article (referenced below), in the previous issue, about whether philosophy had lost its relevance in the modern world. Did it still have a role in the 21st Century of economic paradigms and technological miracles?


There are many aspects to Daniel Kaufman’s discussion on The Decline & Rebirth of Philosophy (Issue 130, Feb/Mar 2019, pp. 34-7), but mine is the perspective of an ‘outsider’, in as much as I’m not an academic in any field and I’m not a professional philosopher.

I think the major problem with philosophy, as it’s practiced today as an academic activity, is that it doesn’t fit into the current economic paradigm which specifically or tacitly governs all value judgements of a profession or an activity. In other words, it has no perceived economic value to either corporations or governments.

On the other hand, everyone can see the benefits of science in the form of the technological marvels they use every day, along with all the infrastructure that they quite literally couldn’t live without. Yet I would argue that science and philosophy are joined at the hip. Plato’s Academy was based on Pythagoras’s quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. In Western culture, science, mathematics and philosophy have a common origin.

The same people who benefit from the ‘magic’ of modern technology are mostly unaware of the long road from the Enlightenment to the industrial revolution, the formulation of the laws of thermodynamics, followed closely by the laws of electromagnetism, followed by the laws of quantum mechanics, upon which every electronic device depends.

John Wheeler, best known for coining the term, ‘black hole’ (in cosmology) said:

We live on an island of knowledge surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.

I contend that the ‘island of knowledge’ is science and the ‘shore of ignorance’ is philosophy. Philosophy is at the frontier of knowledge and because the ‘sea of ignorance’ is infinite, there will always be a role for it. Philosophy is not divorced from science and mathematics; it’s just not obviously in the guise it once was.

The marriage between science and philosophy in the 21st Century is about how we are going to live on a planet with limited resources. We need a philosophy to guide us into a collaborative global society that realises we need Earth more than it needs us.