Topics Philosophy

Question In the rare event that all the professional philosophers in the world agreed on the answer to a philosophical problem, would that mean it is solved? If not, what good is philosophy anyway?

Accepted:
August 8, 2013

Comments

In the event—rare or otherwise—that all physicists in the world agreed on the answer to a physics problem, that wouldn't mean that the problem was solved. It wouldn't mean that because it's at least possible that all the physicists could be mistaken or could be missing some crucial piece of information. So if a discipline's being worthwhile requires that universal agreement among its practitioners amounts to a problem being solved, then there likely aren't any worthwhile disciplines.

Perhaps the preceding remarks show that philosophy can at least provide us with useful distinctions, and that's surely worth something. But forget about agreement; if the criterion for a discipline being worthwhile is that it provide definitive answers to its problems, then deck is already stacked against philosophy. It traffics in exactly the kinds of problems where it's unreasonable to expect definitive answers. However, why think that's the criterion for a discipline's being worthwhile? Definitive answers to interesting questions are a lot less common than you may suppose. And philosophical questions (many of them, anyway) are interesting, as their persistence would seem to indicate.

We find ourselves asking philosophical questions. There's no reason to think that's going to change. Some of these questions deal with things we care deeply about. It's also pretty clear that some attempts to grapple with those questions are more plausible and more intellectually satisfying that others. Since we're not likely to stop caring about philosophical questions, it's hard to see what could be wrong with trying to tackle them as carefully and well as we can.

Question In the rare event that all the professional philosophers in the world agreed on the answer to a philosophical problem, would that mean it is solved? If not, what good is philosophy anyway? Accepted:August 8, 2013

Question In the rare event that all the professional philosophers in the world agreed on the answer to a philosophical problem, would that mean it is solved? If not, what good is philosophy anyway?

Accepted:
August 8, 2013