At Least It’s A Good Time For Philosophy
When the world is going to shit, it’s a great time for philosophy. As Brian Van Norden said, “philosophy is dialogue about important unsolved problems,” and gods know we’ve got plenty of those. Today’s dung heap of history is, to philosophers, a treasure trove.
Forget the answers, we don’t even know the questions anymore. And that’s precisely what philosophy is for. To expand Van Norden:
Today we can all feel the need for philosophy because—unlike unsolved problems in astronomy or chemistry—unsolved problems in philosophy fuck up your life. What do we owe each other during a pandemic? What is democracy? Where does life begin? These are not abstract problems to us. They are very immediate and real, and painfully unresolved.
Today I think we all get the sense that our global society is messed up on a very deep, philosophical level. Beneath the wallpaper of economics and politics, the very plumbing of philosophy is bursting through the walls and literally flooding the world. None of us thinks about plumbing much until the toilet explodes, and that’s…
