Is Philosophy Useless?

Over the years many people have claimed that “philosophy is a dead world-view” while justifying that belief with the many advancements of science or the many benefits of mathematics.

Let’s first define philosophy. Philosophy is a world-view that implements logic, ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics. It asks “why” something is. It uses thought experiments rather than physical observations.

Now, onto the claim, “philosophy is useless”.

Philosophy cannot be useless for two reasons.

1. In order to make the claim something has “use” you must use philosophy.

Whenever deciding the usefulness or lack of usefulness in a situation, you must determine how many people it benefits. This is, inherently, a philosophical axiom known as utilitarianism. Utilitarianism states that the right action is the action that has the outcome of the most people being happy. In essence, the more people that are happy, the more useful it is. Suppose a scientific experiment doesn’t benefit anyone whatsoever — you would call it “useless”. And if it did benefit 9/10 people — you would call it “useful”

This is all philosophy. You must use philosophy in order to determine if something is useful because “useful” has a framework — if “useful” means that it benefits [x] amount of people, then that is a philosophical framework.

The reason why philosophy cannot be useless is because in the statement you are using philosophy to determine what “useful” means. It’s a self-defeating point.

2. Philosophy comes before science

In order to do any scientific experiment, you must take the fundamental rules into account. Such as not harming people.

These are ethical requirements that you must do so as to work in the scientific field. They must come first in a scientific experiment.

Another reason why philosophy comes before science is because whenever you’re making up a hypothesis, you must have a problem, and to have a problem, you must define it. Fundamentally, to define a term such as “problem”, “good”, or “evil”, you must have a philosophical framework.

Suppose you’re a scientist and you’re wondering if you want to solve the problem of cancer. In order to even first start thinking about this, you must consider cancer a problem, and in order to consider cancer a problem, you must have a philosophical framework stating that human suffering is wrong, and therefore we ought to mitigate human suffering as much as humanely possible.

Summary

Ultimately, you cannot have a science problem without philosophy, as without philosophy, you would only have science. You need an ethical framework to determine what a problem is — and from there you can then study science. And you cannot say that philosophy is useless — because if you do, you’re using philosophy to determine how many people philosophy benefits, and you’re therefore contradicting yourself.