TL;DR
Whom am I speaking to? Who is this going to help?
My Practical Experience
My Mind Dump.
What’s the practical use of philosophy? Why do we study philosophy?
Here are six reasons why we study philosophy, directly from James Madison University:
- General Problem Solving Skills
The study of philosophy enhances a person’s problem-solving capacities. It helps us to analyze concepts, definitions, arguments, and problems. It contributes to our capacity to organize ideas and issues, to deal with questions of value, and to extract what is essential from large quantities of information. It also helps us to synthesize a variety of views or perspectives into one unified whole.
- Communication Skills
Philosophy helps us express what is distinctive in our views, it enhances our ability to explain difficult material, and it helps us to eliminate ambiguities and vagueness from our writing and speech.
- Persuasive Powers
Philosophy provides training in the construction of clear formulations, good arguments, and appropriate examples. It, thereby, helps us to develop our ability to be convincing
- Writing Skills
Philosophy teaches interpretive writing through its examination of challenging texts, comparative writing through emphasis on fairness to alternative positions, argumentative writing through developing students’ ability to establish their own views, and descriptive writing through detailed portrayal of concrete examples. Structure and technique, then, are emphasized in philosophical writing.
- Understanding Other Disciplines
Many important questions about a discipline, such as the nature of its concepts and its relation to other disciplines, are philosophical in nature. Since all fields of knowledge employ reasoning and must set standards of evidence, logic and epistemology have a general bearing on all these fields.
- Development of Sound Methods of Research and Analysis
Philosophical thinking strongly emphasizes clear formulation of ideas and problems, selection of relevant data, and objective methods for assessing ideas and proposals. It also emphasizes development of a sense of the new directions suggested by new hypotheses and questions one encounters while doing research. Philosophers regularly build on both the successes and failures of their predecessors. A person with philosophical training can readily learn to do the same in any field.