Alexander80 - 30 September 2012 11:53 AM
Isnt philosophy a creation of our own interpretation of the world, fit to serve our thinking, and therefor unable to be objective and see the “whole picture” aren’t we asking the wrong question sometimes (or all the time)?
I have no idea what you think philosophy is. But if you mean academic philosophy, the answer is clearly ‘no’. Academic philosophy tries to root in clear and rigid definitions, connecting them to ideas via valid logical reasoning. That is not always easy: it is abstract, and it is easy to get lost in those abstractions (one reason why I find it important that in philosophy one is able to illustrate his ideas with clear practical examples). Therefore there is progress in philosophy: in uncovering hidden meanings of words, by showing that the validity of an idea is dependent on presuppositions, it clears up more and more.
The subject of philosophy is of course not the ‘real world’: for that we have the sciences. The subject of philosophy is the way how we think about other subjects. This can be purely descriptive, but also can have prescriptive features, e.g. when unravelling invalid modes of thought. A nice example is the demarcation between science and pseudo science. One can look how the both defer, and if one understands, can raise it to criterion for what a an activity must be in order to call it science.
Another important role for philosophy lies in its interdisciplinary character (when I studied philosophy, the philosophy department was called the ‘central interfaculty’): when sciences meet with other sciences, with politics and culture, there is a lot of misunderstanding that philosophy can help to clarify. Again, often these misunderstandings raise out of false use of concepts, use of unclear concepts, having an unclear picture of what is outside one’s own discipline, etc. (E.g. neurologists saying we have no free will use in fact the incoherent idea of libertarian free will.) In order to play that role, in my time, philosophy students had to study at least one year another science (I chose physics).
As philosophy is a discipline itself (not a science!), it of course also thinks about its own role between the sciences and other human activities. Some philosophers get lost in this area, and then it becomes intellectual masturbation. But if philosophy is strongly oriented on the sciences and is open to the human culture, it is an important discipline in helping to understand the reality we live in.
What philosophy definitely is not: venting free-wheeling ideas about everything (even about things we cannot know!) or scientific coloured speculations.