 So we're at the end of Russell's book, The Values of Philosophy. And what he's told us is that philosophy is not very good for knowledge. At best we get probable opinion. Philosophy is also good for criticism, and that's not nothing, but criticism is mostly useful for other disciplines, or for refining your beliefs in other disciplines as opposed to what you might get with philosophy. So if we can't have knowledge with philosophy, then what's its value? Only if philosophy's aim, Russell says, philosophy's aim is knowledge, and we're not going to get that. So whatever value that we get from philosophy is not the direct value, right? It's what's going to be indirect. Or as one of my old professors, one of my professors from my past used to say, is that, you know, when you're studying philosophy, it's not, you don't study philosophy for what it's good for, or what you do with philosophy. You don't study philosophy for what you can do with philosophy, rather it's what philosophy does to you. So one way to try to understand this value of philosophy is to kind of compare, say, the value in other disciplines. So to start this off, Russell looks at the value of the sciences, physical sciences. And the physical sciences are good, I mean there's just no doubt about that. And you know what Russell says is, the way that these physical sciences are good, at least one of these goods for the physical sciences, is that it has a direct impact on our life. Our scientific advances directly impact our technological advances. And the technological advances very definitely have something to do with our lives, you know. If it wasn't for the scientific advances, we wouldn't have our nice little toys, for example, to help us in our life. I'm using this video camera here, and that's directly impacted by scientific advances. So you know, physical sciences have a direct impact on our life in the sense that we use them very immediately. Now to kind of set up a value in this way, Russell asks us to characterize the practical man. Now this is probably, you know, a bit of a stereotype on Russell's part. But the idea is that, you know, with the practical man, the practical man is concerned about you know, goods that you can hold and touch and feel, goods that are going to affect the body and are going to affect, you know, ease of labor or, you know, the number of things that you can do in a day, efficiency. Now the practical man is concerned with these goods of the body. And the physical sciences are excellent for that. So the physical sciences are quite excellent for the practical man. The practical man is also, Russell says, what we might call narrow in his beliefs. So the practical man just pretty much just sticks with the instinctive beliefs and doesn't really question them, doesn't really ask whether they're justified or whether they could be different or whether they should even be believed, right? Just believes these instinctive beliefs. So the practical man is not going to have any use for philosophy. Philosophy does not produce goods of the body. So this, you know, whatever the value of philosophy is, it's not to be found in how it's going to help me clothe myself during the day or build technology or even how to be, you know, more efficient in my work day. Now the goods of philosophy are not to be had with the body. The goods of philosophy are to be had with the mind. And the practical man doesn't care about that. Well the value of philosophy, whatever goods it serves are not goods of the body, goods of the mind. So this might immediately get us back to the idea that philosophy is going to answer questions for us. Well no, philosophy aims at knowledge, but it's not going to provide knowledge in that sense, right? It's not going to provide definite answers. And one of the reasons is that philosophy, you know, for its strength and its weakness, is that it questions the presumptions with which we begin. And when you do something like that, you can't really get started with a whole lot of definite answers. In fact, the various times that philosophy has settled on some definite answers usually branches off into its own science. So, you know, looking at the stars and question the nature of the universe by starting with the stars led to the study of astronomy and pretty soon cosmology after that. In looking at the nature of things and focusing on physical objects, pretty soon, you know, you start doing the physical sciences and you're no longer really doing philosophy anymore, you're doing the physical sciences. So Russell's point here is that any, you know, philosophy is not going to be good for definite answers. You know, once the stars provide any definite answers, well, it's not philosophy anymore. It's one of these other disciplines. So, in that sense, maybe philosophy is a good for the mind in the sense that it has given birth to the rest of the human intellectual tradition. It's probably not finished yet. Our world's changing all the time and when philosophers look at the presumptions that we have about the world, it tends to branch off onto its own discipline. So, philosophy is not going to be good for answering, you know, its own questions and when it does become good at it, it's no longer philosophy. What about some of these more broad questions? So, well, Russell calls them spiritual questions. What, you know, we might ask, you know, what is the meaning of it all? What's my place in the universe? Do I have a place in the universe? Does the universe have places for things, right? Is there any kind of order or pattern to the universe other than, you know, maybe causation? Is there a purpose? Is there a plan? Does morality matter to anything else besides human beings? And once we're gone, will it matter at all? So, asking these questions, I mean, these are big, important questions. We're not going to get answers to them. At least not using philosophy. We're not going to get definite answers to them, is what Russell says. Definite answers. And by that, you know, we might understand to be, we're not going to get answers that everybody is going to agree with these answers. So whatever goods of the mind that philosophy offers, it's not, you know, knowledge. It's not that it provides these definite answers that, you know, we can now count on. Whatever these goods of the mind are, still not that direct approach. To get to this value of philosophy, it's probably helpful to consider the philosophical person to the practical person. Again, it's probably a stereotype that Russell's dealing with here, but it might be useful for illustration. So the practical person, in some ways, is quite doomed. The practical person relies on instinctive beliefs and doesn't question them. But it doesn't take long to realize that these instinctive beliefs, well, they contradict each other. And you're kind of bound by these instinctive beliefs. You're never allowed to have any imagination beyond them. Instinctive beliefs would simply look around this area and just think about the trees and there's a path and, okay, let's just go forward. And there would never be much thought beyond these instinctive beliefs. Never be much question, query, investigation, just simply what is. The philosophical person, on the other hand, as discussed in the last chapter, has a kind of freedom with reason, has a kind of freedom with logic, by being allowed to question these instinctive beliefs and assume, for the sake of discussion or imagination or inquiry, ask, well, what would it mean for these to be false? What would it mean for these instinctive beliefs to be false? And in doing so, being able to conceive of the world in a wide variety of ways and to be able to stand the world in a wide variety of ways. And the instinctive person is always, always, always going to have his or her beliefs challenged. And in that challenge, they're going to be rejected. Why? Because the instinctive beliefs themselves reject each other. Remember, when you put them all together, you're going to get contradictions. And in that way, the instinctive person is forever arguing with himself or herself or arguing with another instinctive person and always coming to head, always coming to, always butting heads with another instinctive person. And it is instinctive beliefs. And it doomed forever to fight in a sense. And you'll always see this happen. When you get two stubborn people in a room who don't really question their beliefs, it gets ugly pretty fast. The philosophical person doesn't suffer from this malady, at least it's hoped. The philosophical person is able to imagine what it would be like for his or her beliefs, presumptions to be false. And what would the world be like if those beliefs were false? So instead of just thinking about what is, that's important, thinking about what it is. The philosophical person thinks about what could be. And in trying to understand this world, you're given more than just simply what you start with. It's a clear, paved path that way, an uncut path that way. I mean, probably some deer have gone down there, but very few people down the clear cut path. It's okay, you know, it's all right. You can walk along and you wind up back in the same place where you started, it loops around. But the uncut path, there's wonder to be had down there. What trees will I see? What formations will I see? What animals? I probably won't see very many animals down the clear cut path, but down the uncut path, I bet you'll see some critters down there. Instinctive beliefs are a lot like the clear cut path. There's no surprises. You see exactly what you get. You wind up back in the same place where you started. Young cut path, well that's like philosophy. By rejecting the instinctive beliefs, you travel down lines of thought that you would have traveled on otherwise. The imagination is filled with new ideas by just presuming that some things are false. Just take Barkley, thinking about how there might not be any physical objects. What would that mean? How would we interact with each other without any kind of physical objects? All this around me is simply an idea, is all mental. What would science be like? What does it mean to travel into the moon and moon then, since I'm just traveling to an idea? Why does it take so long? For Kant, think about how all of this is really real, but I don't know any of it. What kind of system has to be set in place for my mind to be able to work with all this reality when I, at bottom, don't understand it? So philosophy allows us to think in a wide variety of ways because we can question the presumptions that we start with. And by questioning those presumptions and thinking what would it mean for this to be false, especially in light of everything else, leads to different kinds of views of what is real. It's larger than even just what is. I mean, one of the views might be accurate, right? It might be, but it's larger than that. It's larger than simply what is. It's what can be. Now, this doesn't mean by studying what can be that you necessarily never learn about what is, but, you know, it gets to be larger than that. You get to understand yourself in relation to all of this in different ways. And instinctive beliefs just mostly focus on what you already believe. Focus on the self by expanding these instinctive beliefs, by thinking of different ways of thinking. You not only are able to conceive of more about what exists out here, but other people as well. You may not understand or you don't believe everything that other people believe. That's going to be some disagreement. And to reject that out of hand, well, is what we call closed-minded. To become what we refer to as being open-minded means to actually try to understand what in your beliefs you consider to be true and what in somebody else considers to be true, then the difference between them. To find that those contrary sets. And then to imagine what somebody else believes and to ask yourself, what would it mean for me to believe that? How would I be different if I believe what they believe? And in this sense to become larger, you become more than what you are because you begin to think not just like yourself, but you can imagine what it is to think like everybody else. And with that comes the ability to identify with others. To sympathize with others, to empathize with others, and to consider other people not just as different, but as yourself. And in the end, we're no longer just me and others, us and others. It's just simply us.