Philosophy is useless, or so people will tell you. The general consensus is that it never progresses or solves anything. Or does it?

The whenever-has-epistemology-put-men-in-the-moon feeling is not recent (nor exclusive to philosophy, curiously enough, Plato held poetry in the same way) and will likely continue as far as knowledge can be divided into -ers or -ists. Despite Philosophy’s long history, its baseline questions are still open to some degree or another, which causes the illusion of no progress, specially if compared to the natural sciences. However, the field of ideas is vastly larger than the empirical world, so a philosophical question can never be truly “solved”. There are always different ways to think about it, further sub-questions, and sometimes a plain lack of agreement. For that reason, progress in Philosophy is often measured by the refinement of the questions being asked in the first place and their scope. Consider a question such as “how should I live my life?”. That sounds like it would be impossible to answer in the general, and it probably is, but you may break it down and think first of how our actions in life affect other people – and then you have stumbled into ethics. Once thinking about what is moral or not to do, you might want to know where ethics comes from in the first place. Metaethics. And then you might wonder what does it mean to “know” something… And so on and so forth.

Sometimes, this narrowing down process leads to interesting outcomes. In fact, this is how the very sciences which philosophy is negatively compared to began: our reasoning and our questions about the world became highly specific thus leading to physics, biology, chemistry, etc. Back in his time, Isaac Newton would have described his studies as “natural philosophy”. We take the idea of a scientific method today for granted, however this was something we had to think of and about at some time in history. On this account alone, if all there was to philosophy was the possibility of becoming a science someday, it would already be incredibly useful. However, I would venture a more fundamental aspect to it: philosophy is applied critical thinking, and critical thinking is the basis of any kind of knowledge pursuit, so any advances in philosophy are advances in critical thinking itself and how it can be generally employed. Have you ever heard of a piece of math being invented only for centuries later down the line a physicist use it to explain some phenomena? Philosophy is basically the same for abstract thought, and we will always have a use for that.

Perhaps the idea that philosophy is useless comes from people not being exposed to what philosophers actually do. Scientists need labs, special equipment and the whole nines to operate whereas philosophy requires an armchair at best, so how can it be a practical matter? It is, however, the rigor that separates musing about something in a bar with friends from academic philosophy. Think about just how many things in our daily lives have real, actual consequences to be thought through – the economy, politics, the justice system, which sock to put on first, (human) rights, and duties and priorities of these all. Anything as well we rely on and grip with just by living our day to day lives can have a philosophy done on, which in turn can better our understanding of said thing or be used to advocate, change minds and propose new ideas. At the risk of being captain obvious, ideas must be thought by someone, they do not come from a vacuum. Naturally, not every idea comes from a professional philosopher but anybody thinking critically with rigor about a given topic is likely assuming the role of one.

Incidentally, the notion that philosophy should be useful betrays a teleological assumption of why we study things. That because we can objectively measure things in the natural sciences so should we everywhere else. This in itself is a philosophical position. Oh, the irony.