I was going to comment a bit on my experience with The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained in my last post, but got a bit carried away with my rant on expertise and the worship of it in our society instead. So, this post I actually will talk about the book.
I'm not really going to talk about the book - which is a great, concise summary of several philosophers' major works, and as a result allows me to write this post - but rather my newfound exposure to philosophy in general.
As I'd suspect is also the case with most people, I've had some formal exposure to philosophy in my education and a lot of informal exposure to it throughout life. We're still inundated with names like Socrates, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, and so on, often without knowing what specific contributions they made to the field. I'd also suspect that most people have made (and continue to make) jokes about the employment prospects of philosophy majors. While I'm not here to defend those prospects, I am willing to summarize my new appreciation and nascent understanding of the field of philosophy.
As someone who's historically believed heavily in the scientific method, I've been at least mildly dismissive of some of the work of philosophers when it relates to topics to why we exist and what our role is in the universe. It seemed about as useful as polling people on whether or not they believe in gravity. Even if the overwhelming number of respondents state that they're not in favor of gravity, it doesn't have any effect on the fact that gravity exists.
But, it turns out that the contributions of philosophers is much stronger than I originally allowed myself to believe. Sure, there's still some navel gazing on the nature of our existence (or existentialism), but that scientific method I believe in - Francis Bacon created a first draft of it as part of his own philosophical theories. The method of continuing to ask questions related to the outcome of an experiment? The Socratic method. In fact philosophy, rather than disconnecting itself from the questions usually associated with science, has often been a precursor for strengthening the tools we use for making scientific discoveries today.
Even if you're not into science, philosophy still has a major impact on our world. Love them or hate them, Adam Smith and Karl Marx are political/economic philosophers. It's hard to argue that capitalism and communism have had no impact on everyone in the world.
And, still, if you're so inclined to believe that all philosophy is some sort of psycho-babble, enough other people are captured by philosophers' ideas - good, bad, or misappropriated - and incorporate them in their own lives (and sometimes as global policy) to argue that philosophy as a study is either irrelevant or losing its relevance.
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