Why Is Philosophy Important? The Answer Can Change Your Life

Why study philosophy?

After all, aren’t philosophers just a bunch of people who use big words in unreadable books?

I mean, think about it...

Half the time it seems like they’re preaching to us about how we should act in the world while they bumble through their personal lives.

Although that assumption can prove true more often than I’d like, the importance of philosophy is not owned by philosophers.

It’s also not necessarily the “love of wisdom” as people often translate it from the ancient Greek, φιλοσοφία.

As Emmanuel Levinas put it, we might do better if we think about philosophy as “the wisdom of love.”

I find Levinas’ formulation useful because it reveals how better thinking can help us discover what’s truly important in life.

And when we focus on allowing the love in wisdom to guide us, we will almost certainly respond to our fellow citizens from an elevated position.

Sure, it might not involve “love” as such in a personal way, but it will certainly involve much higher levels of care.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU2Z9J-MijI

What Is the Purpose of Philosophy?

Philosophy has many purposes. One of the best is that it helps us learn how to think. And the more we practice philosophy, the more we have a chance to keep our thinking skills sharp.

Thinking philosophically serves many outcomes too, including benefits for your career. You can benefit from philosophy as a lawyer, artist, civil servant, musician, programmer, manager, or author.

Even if you work in a career that seems like it wouldn’t benefit from critical thinking, you can still engage fruitfully in philosophy.

This is true in three senses because:

One: Philosophy is an active form of thinking.

Not merely think about the questions that arise in life, but to analyze and then argue in a way that produces positive outcomes.

Along the way, we might also create new concepts, a major point made by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?.

We can also create entirely new subject areas or what the philosopher Michel Foucault called discourses.

For example, Foucault points out how Sigmund Freud made it possible to think about the nature of the mind in a way that created far more conversations about things like the “unconscious” than ever before.

By extension, philosophy helps us reorganize existing concepts in unique ways. This is important because if we always approach the history of ideas from the same types of organization, we risk having them always produce the same conclusions.

That’s why I’m always interviewing different memory experts and getting their take on memory science.

For example, speaking with people like Tyson Yunkaporta, Scott Gosnell and Lynne Kelly has provided clues for new ways we can talk about the philosophy of memory by reorganizing how we’ve thought about philosophers of memory from the past.

Two: Personal outlook on life

Active thinking also helps us produce answers to big questions that guide how we live our personal lives.

• What is existence?
• Why do things change?
• What is right?
• What is wrong?
• What inalienable rights do humans have? How about animals and plants?
• How do laws function and under what circumstances can they be ethically broken?
• What is the nature of the mind?
• What is science? Is philosophy itself scientific?
• What is art?
• How do we know that our definitions of the terms we use are correct?
• Why do we believe what we believe?
• Why do we take so many things for granted without examining them?

The purpose of philosophy is to ask and answer questions like these, and there are many more. The more we spend time answering such questions, the better equipped we a...