Commentary on ‘The "Uses" of Philosophy’, downloaded from the web site of Miami University | Oxford, Ohio (go to the pages on Philosophy). My comments have been added in blue. My comments are so negative that I may seem unwise making this effort, merely drawing attention to something not worth reading, but the views about Philosophy which it peddles are very common, and some underlying false presuppositions even more widely held.

The "Uses" of Philosophy Philosophy contributes most directly to the intellectual development of students by raising questions which probe the basic principles of existence and by giving students the opportunity to test their minds against the greatest thinkers of human history.   In the process, it provides students with a number of valuable transferable skills. GMS: Philosophy is the intellectual development of mankind, it is the raising of, and grappling with, questions which probe the basic principles of existence and the testing of ideas with the greatest thinkers of human history.   People who recognise the distinction between Philosophy and, for instance, Physics, may dispute the claim about being the intellectual development of mankind on the grounds that a development in Physics should count as an intellectual development, being some improvement in the explanation of something.   However, the alleged improvement is only intellectual, is only an improvement in explanation, in so far as it is related in some way to the explanation of everything.   An extreme imbalance in developments among different sciences could even be, effectively, a retrogression overal, and so an intellectual retrogression. GMS:   But do academic courses in Philosophy contribute directly to the intellectual development of students?   Do the courses raise questions which genuinely probe the basic principles of existence?   Do they give students the opportunity to test their minds against the greatest thinkers of human history?   Do such courses provide students with valuable transferable skills?   To each of these questions the answer is, ‘Not necessarily,’ indeed they may do the very opposite. GMS:   It is not simply that there can be a huge gap between aspiration and achievement.   The way the aspiration is articulated can mislead, actually taking one further away from its fulfilment.   Not only are the aspirations unlimited, but the scope for self-deception is too.   Thus I felt it necessary to add "grappling with questions" to "raising questions" to counteract a popular delusion that one can be said to be raising a question when one has no intention of looking for an answer to it, or even believes that it is futile to look for an answer.   But such qualifications cannot insure against more subtle forms of self-deception.   For instance, a student who learns about the questions that other people have asked, and who learns about how they have struggled to answer them, may believe he or she is engaged in asking those questions and in struggling to answer them, while in fact completely disengaged.   When this has happened, perhaps it would have been better if the student had never studied Philosophy. GENERAL PROBLEM-SOLVING. The study of philosophy enhances one's problem-solving capacities in a way no other activity does.   It helps one to analyze concepts, definitions, arguments, and problems.   It contributes to one's capacity to organize ideas and issues, to deal with questions of value, and to extract what is essential from masses of information.   It helps one both to distinguish fine differences between views and to discover common ground between opposing positions.   And it helps one to synthesize a variety of views or perspectives into a unified whole. GMS:   In the first three sentences the author's intention is clearly such that the phrase ‘in general’ could be added to ‘problem-solving capacities’, ‘concepts, definitions, arguments, and problems’, etc., as the use of the word ‘general’ in the title of the section suggests.   Otherwise the author is merely emphasising that there is something special about Philosophy without specifying in any way what it is that is special about Philosophy. GMS:   The author’s reasoning is not explicit, but I think that the author believes that "the study of philosophy enhances one's problem-solving capacities" because it involves exercising such capacities, just as a muscle develops by being exercised.   To be fair to the author, this is not going so far as to claim that Philosophy is general problem-solving, any more than the author claims that Philosophy is the intellectual development of mankind, as I did above.   Such a thesis about the nature of Philosophy (that it is general problem-solving) would seem to be equivalent to the thesis of Analytic Philosophy, that Philosophy is conceptual analysis.   This conception of Philosophy is in conflict with, for instance, the aspiration to raise "questions which probe the basic principles of existence."   The notion of problem-solving seems to involve an acceptance of the framework of the problem as a given and trying to work within it, rather than questioning that framework or even trying to understand or explain that framework more clearly. GMS: While I admit that certain kinds of problem-solving may enhance one’s problem-solving capacities more generally, I think that there are problems about generalising the notion of problem-solving, and I suspect that, for instance, mathematical problem-solving may be more appropriate for training the sort of general problem-solving capacities envisaged.   The actual study of Philosophy which an undergraduate does at a university is, of course, likely to be even less appropriate when a significant motivation for doing it is to enhance some sort of general problem-solving skill. COMMUNICATION SKILLS. Philosophy also contributes uniquely to the development of expressive and communicative powers.   It provides some of the basic tools of self-expression––for instance, skills in presenting ideas through well-constructed, systematic arguments––that other fields either do not use, or use less extensively.   It helps one to express what is distinctive of one’s view; enhances one's ability to explain difficult material; and helps one to eliminate ambiguities and vagueness from one’s writing and speech. GMS: This is true only in so far as Philosophy is communication.   In so far as Philosophy isn’t, the study of Philosophy may have quite the opposite effect.   In so far as some one needs to develop a practical skill associated with communication, this is best acquired by practising the skill in contexts similar, in relevant respects, to the one where it is needed.   The study and use of language in appropriate contexts has more relevance than the study of any formalised logic to presenting ideas through well-constructed, systematic arguments.   Indeed Philosophy itself illustrates that the elimination of ambiguity and vagueness is often not a simple matter, as those philosophers most keen to emphasise it end up being just as abstruse and prolix as the philosophers they rail against.   I think that mathematics provides a good preparation for Philosophy, but not if it encourages a direct application of mathematical logic, or any other unreflective transfer of mathematical ideas. GMS: While I am prepared to claim that Philosophy exists only in being communicated, I do not think that every thing that exists only in being communicated is Philosophy. PERSUASIVE POWERS. Philosophy provides training in the construction of clear formulations, good arguments, and apt examples.   It thereby helps one develop the ability to be convincing.   One learns to build and defend one's own views, to appreciate competing positions, and to indicate forcefully why one considers one's own views preferable to alternatives.   These capacities can be developed not only through reading and writing in philosophy, but also through the philosophical dialogue, in and outside the classroom, that is so much a part of a thoroughgoing philosophical education. GMS: This is true only in so far as Philosophy is rhetoric––about winning oral debates.   While I accept Derrida’s arguments about there being no absolute qualitative difference between oral and written utterances, nevertheless there are practical reasons why the written word has always dominated in Philosophy, even in Ancient Greece while the wider culture was still largely oral.   Conversation still has an important, perhaps even necessary, role to play in Philosophy, but it is almost always evoked by, and often directed toward being organised into, the written word.   Furthermore, while mastery of the written word can help in mastery of the spoken word (and vice versa), they are different skills. GMS: The belief that Philosophy is rhetoric was effectively the belief of the ancient Sophists.   The assumption of this belief here may reflect a revival of Sophism in modern times. GMS: It is worth noting that the author of ‘The "Uses" of Philosophy’ includes the phrase "to appreciate competing positions" although, as a throwaway remark, it will be completely ineffective as a check on the emphasis on winning arguments.   As Plato illustrates in The Republic, when one person in a one-to-one debate withdraws from it, the debate does not have to end there.   Indeed, even if a person has been won over to the other side by the arguments put forward, the second person may consider that the debate has been won too easily, and therefore feel it necessary to elaborate further the arguments too readily abandoned by the first person––i.e. to begin to argue on both sides of the debate.   It is when a debate becomes so internalised as to be an immanent critique (to use Karl Marx's apt phrase) that Philosophy becomes exciting, exciting because it has come alive in one’s mind. WRITING SKILLS. Writing is taught intensively in many philosophy courses, and many regularly assigned philosophical texts are unexcelled as literary essays.   Philosophy teaches interpretive writing through its examination of challenging texts, comparative writing through emphasis on fairness to alternative positions, argumentative writing through developing students’ ability to establish their own views, and descriptive writing through detailed portrayal of concrete examples, the anchors to which generalizations must be tied.   Structure and techniques, then, are emphasized in philosophical writing.   Originality is also encouraged, and students are generally urged to use their imagination and develop their own ideas. GMS:   This is true only in so far as Philosophy is good writing.   This is not as silly as it may sound.   While the quality of the writing style does not itself give a good measure of the quality of the philosophy in a work, other things being equal, the better the style the better the philosophy.   In so far as Kant or Hegel are unnecessarily difficult to read they have failed as philosophers.   But in so far as either of them has expressed an important insight no other philosopher has done, it is better that it was expressed, however obscurely, than that it should never have been expressed at all. GMS:   In a sense I think that Philosophy is interpretive writing through the examination of challenging texts, although I must qualify this characterisation of Philosophy just as I have qualified many of the other characterisations above.   Philosophy is not just any interpretive writing of texts challenging in any way whatsoever.   However, I suspect that I may be giving a different sense to the phrase ‘interpretive writing’ than the writer of ‘"Uses" of Philosophy’ intends.   (He or she may be taking it in a more passive or less self-critical way, like Heidegger’s "Philosophy is interpretation.") GMS:   I think that Philosophy is unique among disciplines in that philosophic works have been written in almost every conceivable literary genre or style.   This is in stark contrast with literary criticism and the academic study of literature, which, while concerned with studying all varieties of style and genre, are very limited in the kind of style or genre they use to express the fruits of such study. GMS:   Structure and content are not separable in Philosophy, being one of those dualisms that Philosophy cannot come to rest in, or to accept simply as given.   This is the reason, I think, that someone once described Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to me as a poem.   Thus appreciating the structure of philosophic works tends to be important in understanding their content, particularly if one includes structural comparisons with other works by the same author, or even with works by others, and the reasons underlying structural parallels. UNDERSTANDING OTHER DISCIPLINES. Philosophy is indispensable for this.   Many important questions about a discipline, such as the nature of its concepts and its relation to other disciplines, do not belong to that discipline, are not usually pursued in it, and are philosophical in nature.   Philosophy of science, for instance, is needed to supplement the understanding of the natural and social sciences which one derives from scientific work itself.   Philosophy of literature and philosophy of history are of similar value in understanding the humanities, and philosophy of art is important in understanding the arts.   Philosophy is, moreover, essential in assessing the various standards of evidence used by other disciplines.   Since all fields of knowledge employ reasoning and must set standards of evidence, logic and epistemology have a general bearing on all these fields. GMS:   While the nature of sciences and academic disciplines is a concern in Philosophy, and such concern is necessarily for the long-term development of the sciences and disciplines, this does not mean that the study of Philosophy offers any particular help to the individual student who wishes to participate in one of those sciences or disciplines, and the study of Philosophy is certainly not an indispensable prerequisite.   It is not the business of Philosophy to set standards to a particular discipline, but the business of the discipline itself, part of what it means to be an "autonomous" science or discipline.   The science or discipline is not directly its own subject-matter, that which it is studying, and so when it attempts to explain more fully in words its own nature, to justify its procedures more generally on rational grounds, and to champion its value in a wider context of explaining everything, then it strays into Philosophy.   The relationship between Philosophy and a science is misconceived, therefore, if they are supposed to be offering explanations to be placed side by side, supplementing one another. GMS:   Philosophy of Science, including History as a science, is this interface or bridge between Philosophy and the sciences.   As such it is not directly concerned with assessing the standards of evidence in particular sciences, but rather with the general notion of standards of evidence as a necessary element in any science.   I suspect that the reference to logic is a reference to Formal Logic, in which case it has no special relevance to Philosophy of Science in general, though it has relevance to Philosophy of Mathematics in so far as Mathematics includes Formal Logic.   I am not even sure that as a reference to informal logic it is any more relevant to Philosophy of Science, being then more relevant to reflections on the nature of Philosophy itself. GMS:   It is not uncommon for scientists, inspired by some development within their own particular science, to reflect on their discipline and so to begin to philosophise, yet completely lacking in any notion of Philosophy as a science or discipline or coherent enterprise.   Unfortunately, many philosophers, over-awed by the achievements of some sciences, have betrayed Philosophy by subscribing to various kinds of scientism, that is, regarding Philosophy as a sort of epiphenomenon of those successful sciences.   Thus the philosophising scientists are encouraged to behave as if Philosophy has only just begun with their entry into it, and so begins the philosophic equivalent of re-inventing the wheel. GMS:   The mention of art as among the disciplines suggests that the word ‘discipline’ is being used in a wider sense than I have used above, as a science or academic discipline.   There are many academic disciplines taken up with the discussion and appraisal of works of art, and the original writer may simply have these in mind, but there is a wider sense of the word in which the practice of an art, the production of a work of art, participates in an associated discipline.   Indeed, in this wider sense, it is an associated artistic discipline that enables one to talk of a history of some particular kind of art. GMS:   I am not sure what is meant by "philosophy of literature".   The only sense I can give to it is to consider it part of Aesthetics (Philosophy of Art), the part concerning literature as a form of art.   Perhaps it deserves a special name, having a special place within Aesthetics, since the written word is the form through which Philosophy reflects on itself. DEVELOPMENT OF SOUND METHODS OF RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS. Still another value of philosophy in education is its contribution to one’s capacity to frame hypotheses, do research, and put problems into manageable form.   Philosophical thinking strongly emphasizes clear formulation of ideas and problems, selection of relevant data, and objective methods for assessing ideas and proposals.   It also emphasizes development of a sense of the new directions suggested by the hypotheses and questions one encounters in doing research.   Philosophers regularly build on both the success and failures of their predecessors.   A person with philosophical training can readily learn to do the same in any field. GMS:   The methods of research and analysis which are appropriate ("sound") vary widely with the different sciences, and even change wihin a science as it develops, and Philosophy itself has its own distinctive problem about articulating what its own method should be.   The author appears to overlook this distinctiveness, perhaps taken in by the professionalisation of Philosophy (enamoured too much perhaps by Analytic Philosophy or some form of scientism), thereby able to talk so glibly of clarity ("clear formulation of ideas and proposals"), of "objective methods" and of philosophers building on "both the success and failures of their predecessors."   I agree that these notions are applicable within Philosophy, but the student is bound to be disappointed if the student expects that applicability to be as straightforward and as easily recognised as in any other science.