What's The Point?

How do I explain the question that people have for me when they find out philosophy is a mandatory course in Liberal Arts?

The question is important. It shows how people feel and have felt for centuries about "academic" philosophy. They don't trust its value.

"Why do I have to think about irrelevant shit that is never going to effect my life?" "Isn't this stuff just over-thinking?" "What practical value does it have?"

This is what I get. Some people are natural thinkers and they don't feel this way, but most do. In Thomas Reid's day he represented the masses who asked these same questions of thinkers like David Hume. Hume said they couldn't prove objects, causality, or the notion of self. Not only was this annoying, it seemed impractical and almost a game (sophistry). Reid's point was that the masses asked real questions (why is this important?) and they deserved real answers.

So, that's what we're setting out to do.

I will categorize the subsequent essays into two categories, 1) philosophy as a learning tool to maximize doing other, more seemingly relevant things and 2) philosophy as a corrective tool for social/cultural trends that have caused serious decay.

Firstly, I find that philosophical conversations, when done correctly (personally I prefer critical commonsense), stimulate our innate process intelligence. Make us real problem solvers about other more specific things. We may practice discussing "free will" in order to gain access to that part of our brain, to facilitate being, for example, inventive - building an electric car. It can be seen as a tool to do something else. It is an exercise or a learning tool that is still fundamental and serves a specific goal - practicing with bigger questions.

Secondly, I can make the case that social/moral problems have increased. When I do, I hope you can see how these problems cannot be fixed by specific "scientific" endeavors. Often, for example, people stuck in an intellectually impoverished society lack the tools for even diagnose intellectual poverty. They don't know that it needs fixing. Rand's point was that the world was falling apart and that everybody raised in "follower" culture (what I call a religious worldview or rote-only system) doesn't just fail to fix problems, they fail to see them. If the fundamental understanding that a failed society has operates on a philosophical level, then it requires a philosophical fix. We cannot fix three centuries of moral decay in a laboratory, for instance. Even though modern people see philosophers as silly (as they did in 1760) they still buy into cultural/moral language, which is, by the way, a form of philosophy. Deeper issues, like religion, language, freedom, politics and ethics are outside the domain of science and still the property of philosophy. So if you agree they need fixing, you can be convinced that working out these social/moral issues is the first step to fixing these large, real problems.