I'm curious to know how all of you would defend against the claim that philosophical work does not contribute to the improvement of society. The best defense I have come up with for (political) philosophy is the following:
Although the productiveness of philosophical work isn't necessarily quantifiable, it has no doubt made its impact in the drafting of legislation and constitutions. In fact, the founding documents of America were the products of hundreds, if not thousands, of years of philosophical debate about the rights of human beings, the role of the state, as well as the nature of the good life. Our Founding Fathers did not make up everything on their own. On the contrary, like all great intellectuals, they stood on the shoulders of giants who came before them. They reached into the knowledge bank of political philosophy and extracted what they thought valuable. And where previous work proved insufficient or inappropriate, they added their own contributions.
This is how I understand the nature of philosophy in academia. Each publication adds a letter to the alphabet soup of knowledge. The letter that is contributed could represent a variety of things; it could represent a solution to a specific problem, an incongruency in someone else's work, or even a grand theory of justice. It cannot be said beforehand what any one work will achieve in the near or distant future, but again, unquantifiability should not be confused with unproductivity. It is not until the alphabet soup has the correct letters that the necessary word can be formed in the future. Each political document that has touched upon the big questions discussed in philosophy is a word that consists of a specific arrangement of letters pulled from the alphabet soup. Which letters will be necessary to address a specific issue cannot be predicted. The only thing we can do is to increase the size of the soup so that when a problem does arise, we have the tools to deal with it.
Leave a Reply