sunnuntai 20. syyskuuta 2015

Are philosophical truths worth knowing?

If philosophers, in some distant future, manage to find out some philosophical truths (don't hold your breath), would those truths be even worth knowing? I highly doubt it.
Paul Horwich has pointed out what he takes to be a questionable feature of theoretical or traditional philosophy:
"its presupposition that true philosophical theories are worth knowing. The grounds for scepticism on this point are that none of the explanations of the objective value of true belief available elsewhere appears to carry over to philosophy." (Wittgenstein's Metaphilosophy, 2013)
Most people would probably agree that philosophy doesn't give us practical benefits. But what about the value of 'sheer understanding'? According to Horwich, there is no such understanding to be found in the realm of traditional philosophy:
"in the a priori domain we cannot reasonably deploy the picture of increasingly profound layers of reality - the lower-level facts explaining the higher-level ones. Thus we do not have genuine explanatory depth in philosophy. So it is hard to see what sort of 'understanding' its theories could conceivably provide." (ibid.)
Horwich is right. It is likely that philosophy does not provide anything of value, not even for those who pursue sheer understanding or knowledge for knowledge's sake.

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