Some Reflections on Philosophical Work: Fruits and Purposes

I am now typing up this post at the Dubai International Airport, as I wait for my transit flight. It's a three hour wait approx., and I thought that it's about time I do some serious 'teleological' reflection.

If you've read a good sample of my other posts in this blog before, you may find this more 'personal' (or less dry and boring, as I occasionally am aware of are adjectives that can aptly apply to my other posts). So hopefully this would be a change for good. But let me first post a brief update on what I've been doing. At this point, I've:

• just spent ten weeks in London on a taught Master's programme in Philosophy,
• (and as a result of that) spent a huge sum of money which may be better off invested in a randomly selected stock from the FTSE;
• remained effectively unemployed and made little progress in developing any substantial career plans;
• on a more positive note, learnt about the philosophical issues and debates which crop up in the fields of psychology and biology. (under the heading philosophy of psychology and philosophy of biology)

So perhaps the thing that's bugging me is this: what exactly have I been trying to do? I know I'm trying to learn and engage myself in these interesting philosophical debates as possible, but what good is all that? Let's say I'm not in it for the money; let's say I'm doing these intellectual pursuits to create new knowledge for mankind. But what good is philosophy of psychology to the field of psychology, and what good is philosophy of biology to the field of biology? If I am neither a practicing psychology nor biologist, then is what I do purely for the satisfaction of my own curiosity? In that case, it would seem awfully selfish of me to spend so much money (originally belonging to people who funded my degree out of love) and time where the only reward is my pleasure.

Maybe I'm just thinking about the quote that's often attributed to Richard Feynman, that "philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds." But I think the worry goes deeper. If all of philosophy is like that (i.e. pretty damn useless), then I do kind of feel like I'm just climbed many rankings on the World's Biggest Idiots for spending so much time thinking about these philosophy problems.

There are two obvious strategies to get out of this pessimistic whatever-you-call-it. First, it's always more-or-less comforting to cite the instrumental advantages of doing philosophy, e.g. enhanced ability to talk about a wide range of subjects, improved critical thinking abilities, knowledge of the history of ideas and so on. But even so, all of this doesn't seem to warrant the time and money spent doing philosophy - if these are the only rewards of philosophy - because it seems pretty probable that you can get such abilities or knowledge cheaper and quicker by other means. Hence, I'm going to need a more 'robust' purpose for what I do.

The second strategy then, is to stubbornly insist that there's nothing wrong with investing in an activity that is intrinsically valuable, or an activity that is good even if it brings no other obvious reward. An example of this - maybe - is sex; people enjoy and have no problem doing it, even if it's not for some higher purpose. Personally I'm not too keen on justifying doing philosophy by comparing it to sex, but this strategy seems somewhat just better than the first one. Maybe a better parallel is music, which people really enjoy for its own sake; but I can't say for sure if music students do not sometimes ponder or doubt the purposes of their undertakings.

OR maybe - philosophy can really yield 'solid' intellectual fruits. It's probably true that philosophy may not produce any 'positive' knowledge like Newton's Three Laws. But if you see philosophy as the activity of conceptual analysis, then you can still get 'negative' knowledge by eliminating problematic concepts and bad inferences. You probably won't ever end up with a really good model or theory about anything in philosophy, but all the critical and analytical work can help you identify WHAT would not be a good model/theory. Perhaps then, this could be a really good motivation for philosophy besides its 'pleasure' value.

...But how well can philosophy SHOW beyond question the falsity of theories? If it leaves plenty of room for debate, then one may as well accept philosophy to be merely a 'fun intellectual activity for ages 3 or above'...

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