Topics Philosophy

Question Why should an average, run of the mill, person care about philosophy? The vast majority of people I know don't give a damn whether a given action is "a priori" or "a posteriori," for example. The closest they come to philosophy are stupid questions that any beginning philosophy major could solve, like "Can God make a rock so heavy He can't lift it?" And these are merely bait to get an emotional reaction out of me, not a true question about philosophy!

Accepted:
May 9, 2008

Comments

Well, why should an "average" person (whoever she is) care about the history of Venetian convents in the sixteenth century, or about the genetics of mice, or about large cardinal axioms in set theory, or the geology of the Caucasus mountains, or Italian linguistics?

No special reason!

Why should it be any different for philosophy? Why indeed should the man in the street care about the limits of a priori knowledge, or about whether we should be structuralists about the natural numbers, or what the correct theory of conditionals is, or whether the theory-theory is better than the simulation theory about how we ascribe mental contents, or ...

Again, no special reason at all.

Of course, philosophers' in-house questions can have their roots in "what is ..?/how is it possible that...?/can we know whether ...?/what should we do ...?" questions of broader appeal. But then in-house questions from historians and scientists, say, ultimately have similar roots. And there is no particular reason why, even if someone has more than their share of general human curiosity, that they should end up interested in one bunch of questions, at one level of abstraction, rather than another bunch at a different level of abstraction. A few like a bit of philosophical sweep to their questions; others (and they are more common) like to get their hands dirty in the nitty gritty of the laboratory or delving in the archives. And lots more aren't interested either way. Why should they be?

The exceptional case, perhaps, is some questions in morals and politics, hard questions that face us all (and which perhaps are uncomfortable to think about). Perhaps more of us should be thinking a bit harder about some of them. Though even here it is open to doubt whether philosophy is especially where to look for the answers to the pressing questions -- it is just part of (sometimes a small part of) the ongoing conversation.