“You want to know why philosophy matters? This is the true answer, and the one upon which we must plant our flag: philosophy is the most productive force ever discovered by human beings and we are responsible for modernity. Philosophy is the great gear deep in the heart of the world, and when that gear moves, the Earth trembles.”
That’s Steven Hales, professor of philosophy at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, in a glorious rallying cry posted at his newsletter, Scriptorium Philosophia.
He continues:
It is philosophers who created systematic ethics, interconnected principles defensible by reason, instead of mere lists of rules handed out by the gods. We are the ones who developed formal logic and the laws of deductive inference. We are the ones who criticized the divine right of kings and laid down the foundations of constitutional governments. We are the inventors and architects of the scientific method.
He notes that “philosophy is the first academic discipline, the first show from which all the others are spin-offs” and proceeds to describe the disciplinary speciation philosophy gave rise to.
Furthermore, philosophers have “sacrificed everything” to bring you all of this, he says, recounting many of the philosophers who have been punished or killed for philosophizing in history. And now today, there’s this: “our entire field is under attack by a managerial class convinced the only purpose of college is getting 22-year-olds their first job. They are cynics who know the price of everything but the value of nothing.”
He writes about the personal and cultural importance of philosophy, the humanities more broadly, and the arts, telling philosophers to stand tall.
If you need some motivation this morning, or just want to feel good about philosophy, check it out. And then send it to your dean.
Best defense / rant I’ve read in a long time. Comments are also worthwhile. Made my morning. Thanks for sharing.
In line with everything said here – If you want proof of the power of philosophy, just read pages 24-25 of Thi Nguyen’s new book The Score. If you don’t want to do that, go talk to any professor who’s gotten feedback that their class made an impact on a student’s life.
This was a pleasant early morning read. Thanks! Aquinas said something similar: “Inter omnia vero hominum studia sapientiae studium est perfectius, sublimius, utilius et iucundius” (SCG I, 2). That is: “Among all human pursuits, the study of wisdom is more perfect, more sublime, more useful, and more full of joy.”
Philosophy would have been even more productive, if it did not take philosophers 6+ months to review their peers’ journal submissions.
Dang… That WAS a good rant — and it DID lift my spirits. Thanks for writing it, Steven, and for sharing it, Justin!
Great essay/rant. Thanks, Dr. Hales.
I’ve tended to be suspicious of claims that attempt to elevate the importance of philosophy via its status as “the mother of all disciplines” or “the first discipline”, because this at best shows that philosophy is of historical importance, but critics of philosophy are targeting its contemporary importance. Does contemporary philosophy continue to churn out new disciplines? No. Does it produce work relevant to disciplines of the day? To an extent, yes. Does it produce useful theories, concepts, etc for broader society? To an extent, also yes. But the latter two positives are 1) not nearly as grandiose as the negative, and 2) critics of philosophy do not completely reject this.
“Does contemporary philosophy continue to churn out new disciplines? No.”
Yes.
Cognitive science, as noted by Steven Hales:
“Finally, philosophy is one of the mother disciplines of the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science.”
Well documented:
Gardner, Howard. *The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution*. Basic Books, 1985.
https://a.co/d/5txK6XW
This isn’t my area, though would you agree that cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field that is only partly philosophy, and so it’s an exaggeration to say that philosophy birthed it? Still, this is a good example and it shows that I was wrong to think that it’s straightforward how philosophy has ceased to be relevant to birthing more disciplines. (Though I still maintain that most new disciplines have little to do with philosophy–unless we’re understanding this as some general method of thinking rather than the academic discipline.) Thanks.
Howard Gardner does indeed document the multidisciplinary origins of cognitive science, philosophy being only one.
Yet all the others were birthed from philosophy.
I addressed the ‘What about nowadays?’ criticism here.
Excellent! Love it.
Ps however you know what I love less? I literally just noticed in the picture at the top of this article that Legolas is wearing a saddle. Tolkien is quite clear that Legolas, as is the way of elves, rode bareback. Tsk tsk
Philosophy is so important that we should take every opportunity to spread it as widely as we can.
I wonder if this relies too much on the fact most deep thinkers used to self-define as philosophers. Isaac Newton was a natural philosopher, and so on. What people called philosophers did in the past isn’t the same as what people called philosophers do now.
I think this is true to a degree, but it’s also true that much of newtons work was philosophical in method, and e.g. thought experiments and arguments by contradiction and so on to establish things like what’re they spatial position os absolute not relative and so on. Thats my impression anyhow.
A different kind of appreciation for this piece and philosophy’s importance…
I have problems with almost everything Hales says in this piece. By that, I don’t mean that I disagree with everything.
For instance, I completely agree that philosophers “are responsible for modernity”. I just have a VERY different evaluation of modernity. Much of my work is about the injustice and destruction brought by modernity, which I take to be inextricable from white supremacist settler colonialism.
I’d also defend lots of philosophers back to the beginning. I would point out, though, that Hales is 2000 years too late talking about the beginning of philosophy in terms of a tradition from Thales to Aristotle. As many have pointed out before, super interesting philosophy was happening in Kemet, in Mesopotamia, in India, in China, and throughout what would come to be known as the Americas long before the Thales-to-Aristotle tradition.
Seeing things differently here, again, even another place where we agree, e.g. that “We are the inventors and architects of the scientific method”, looks very different. Hales discusses this in terms of a tradition from Bacon to Popper. I see Bacon-to-Popper as a recent and narrow tradition in the invention and architecture of scientific method. I’d talk about folx and communities like Imhotep, Lady Peseshet, the Mohists, classic Maya mathematicians, astronomers, and architects, Gupta era mathematician astronomers like Aryabhata, and many Islamic Golden Age philosophers, but absolutely, positively, Ibn al-Haytham at the very least.
Still, I’m genuinely glad that Hales wrote the piece. I’d also genuinely enjoy having a discussion with him about the differences in how we see things. I want there to be a space where that kind of discussion happens. I want there to be a space where people distinguish between agreeing, supporting, collaborating, respecting. I think philosophy does this really poorly, really often. Still, I’m going to defend philosophers trying to do this to the end!
Thanks for reading my St. Crispin’s Day speech!
While this is of course intended to be bombastic, crediting the discipline of philosophy with modernity seems a bit ambitious. The transition to open access social orders involved not just some exceptionally smart people thinking of how it would be nice to have rights and all that, but also weak monarchs, new modes of production, interstate competition, and other external historical circumstances.