Philosophy: The Most Practical Subject You Can Study
Improving your thought process is an investment you benefit from every day
Of all the subjects offered at school, philosophy doesn’t strike us as particularly useful or practical. It doesn’t teach you how to help the sick, make a wooden table, or speak a new language — now that you think of it, what does philosophy really involve? What do you do in a philosophy class?
Despite being widely misunderstood, I believe philosophy is the most practical subject you can take, meaning you apply what you learn from it daily. It is not idle daydreaming or obscure thought experiments which have no relation to everyday life — it is an investigation into the concepts we use every day, but take completely for granted.
Take knowledge, for example. It might seem superfluous to ask questions such as ‘how can we know things?’, ‘what constitutes knowledge?’, or ‘can we really know anything at all?’, but each of these involve a useful reflection on the world. It shows us that something we take to be true might be less reliable than we thought, or that we fail to question certain characters who have an air of authority, like a teacher.
Some branches of philosophy are, no doubt, very obscure — but this is true for every discipline. Just as there are strange realms of inquiry in respected STEM subjects (especially maths), there are impractical branches of philosophy. But the very process of learning philosophy, in which you are constantly analysing and questioning, develops a key skill that you will use more often than any other — reason.
Being able to identify underlying assumptions in conversations and expose poor logic in arguments is indeed the bedrock of society — it is this which makes us rational and (to some) elevates humans above our animal cousins. Philosophy must have a place outside academia to maintain the trust and integrity of not only judicial systems, which involves making logical conclusions from evidence but everyday interactions with fellow people.
The fruits of philosophy are inherently more difficult to see, as they improve the process of thinking rather than providing demonstrable knowledge, like how to pilot a plane. To show how this is nonetheless practical, take the example of improving the armour of bombers during WWII. Reviewing the returning planes, the US military concluded that armour should be added to the areas that have sustained the most damage. Statistician Abraham Wald, however, noted that they could only study the aircraft that had returned, so the damaged areas actually represented the places the bomber could afford to take hits. Therefore the best places to reinforce the plane were the unscathed areas, as bombers hit there didn’t make it back. By identifying the logical fallacy of survivorship bias, in which only the things that survived a selection process (in this case, a bombing raid) were considered, he found the best way to increase the odds for pilots to survive.
The key here is that the process of analysis is critical. Philosophy won’t teach you how to build, maintain, or pilot a plane. But its merits are invaluable regardless, and widely applicable across every discipline. For all the ‘transferable skills’ lauded by employers today, wisdom is perhaps the most transferrable of them all.
James is an undergraduate passionate about social issues, climate change, and philosophy. He aims to have enough optimism to dream of a better future, while providing practical advice to help achieve it.
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