Response Crash Course Philosophy Ep. 1 What is Philosophy

In this response I will produce my personal responses towards several statements of the video which I consider to be interesting or important to respond to or to criticize. Foremost, “philosophy explains what cannot be explained by science.” This is true, science cannot explain away most metaphysical, ethical, or epistemological problems. As it is not within the scope or powers of science to explain such problems.

Now some people think that it is religion which fills in the gaps of science, but this is not true. Religion is simply an extension of philosophy as it is the personal interpretation of the divine raised to the level of certain truth, sometimes without further critical evaluation. It is thus can be seen as a downgrade of philosophy as it lacks the systematic scepticism philosophy has. In fact, to question God is sometimes seen as a crime in religion, or “blasphemy”. Whereas in philosophy it is common to question and disbelieve.

Sometimes religion is even pragmatical in terms of its truths, it is not taken as complete truth with actual justification, rather that it is true because it is useful for daily life. Some forms of philosophical thinking accept pragmatical thinking, but my view of philosophy demands complete justified truth, not mere faith. As such philosophy explains what religion fails to adequately explain, supposedly philosophy is the true religion mandated by God and not other religions. Only through philosophy we can obtain knowledge of the absolute Good which is God Herself.

It is noteworthy that philosophy used to be the academic study of practically anything, which may include golf. However, philosophy diverged into the various sciences and now philosophy stands as the study of the nature of reality or human reality. Despite the divergence, all sciences trace their bases and roots back to the philosophical study. As a result, there is a philosophy for each science, and we know that there is still a philosophy of science in general. This shows the power of philosophy despite it dying by itself.

I am rather annoyed by the placement of aesthetics in the high hierarchies of philosophy. Yes, aesthetics is not completely useless, but it is not as useful as things such as social philosophy. Instead of aesthetics I propose the study of social philosophy to be placed alongside with ethics. As it is strongly connected with ethics and both makes up the bulk of value theory. Perhaps the placement of aesthetics reflects the shift of philosophy from truth to pragmatical truth, a sad and enraging reality.

However, such idea is not the most outrageous in this video, I am most in disagreement with the idea that philosophy is the study of questions and its success is by the quality of our thinking. First of all, philosophy is like any other science, that is the pursuit of answers and not just studying questions and various attempts at answering them. Second, if we want to improve the quality of our thinking, then that is the purpose of logic and not philosophy. Philosophy’s purpose is to obtain knowledge about the foundations of reality and the nature of reality itself.

If we understand the many philosophers spread across history, all great philosophers are producers of philosophical ideas, they make attempts to answer the great questions. Some attempts are better than others, but all has shown that all of philosophy is to answer questions. The only problem is that most philosophers have not found a way to agree upon an answer towards any philosophical question. Such that philosophy is now as divided as a nation in civil war.

These statements might reflect the reality that now philosophy focuses itself academically on the study of historical ideas and simply as practice of logic rather than actual philosophical advancements. I do not see any successful attempts to promote philosophy as a science with equal standing and perhaps as the authority of the sciences. There is minimal news of philosophy in popular culture and probably no objective philosophical knowledge.

It seems that this is a shift from the focus of truth in philosophy towards a more pragmatical form of philosophy. Here is the problem, by the principles of pragmatism itself, actual truth is required to achieve anything in reality. As such when truth is put aside for “pragmatic” purposes, we will fail those purposes completely. It is the reason that we are entering an era of post-truth, where truth loses its value and other values rise such as relativism or perhaps tolerance.

I do applaud the statement that philosophy is present in all of daily life as all moral judgements are indeed the practice of philosophy, that is the practice of ethics. I have once written or thought that philosophy can be divided into theoretical and practical philosophy. Theoretical philosophy is the theory of philosophy, while practical philosophy is the practice of the theories. In this case it is the theory of ethics and the practice of ethics. As such I believe philosophy should supplement religion so people may understand ethics better and be more ethical.

I believe that is all I can say for this response.