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¶ … value of studying philosophy?
According to Chapter 15 of Bertram Russell's tract The Problems of Philosophy: "The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason" (Russell, Chapter 15). One of the most common objections to studying philosophy is that it is a violation of 'common sense.' Critics state that philosophy has little or no use because philosophical debates do not address 'real' issues. Along such lines of thinking, 'real issues' include feeding the hungry, economic problems, and other materially-related concepts that philosophy's focus on abstraction does not address.
However, Russell's argument is that 'common...
Not so many years ago in human history, it was 'common sense' that slavery was necessary, that African-Americans were unequal to whites, and women were fundamentally different than men. Only by questioning one's prejudices -- questioning every accepted truth, including one's innate assumptions of reality -- can someone be free of prejudices and truly conceptualize new ideas. Philosophy enables us to do this.
In the eyes of common sense, "what it calls knowledge is not a union with the not-Self, but a set of prejudices, habits, and desires, making an impenetrable veil between us and the world beyond" (Russell, Chapter 15). In other words, when we acquire knowledge in a 'common sense' fashion, without the guiding intelligence of philosophy, we are merely looking into a mirror of our contemporary era's ideas and ideals. We are not truly getting to the bottom of what is truth, but merely confirming…
Work Cited
Russell Bertram. The Problem of Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 1959.
http://www.ditext.com/russell/russell.html [17 Sept 2012]
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