 Is it solipsistic in here, or is it just me? Philosophy can be hard to define, but in general it's the study of ideas about the fundamental nature of things like life, knowledge, ethics, reality, that sort of stuff. It has sort of a reputation for being pointless naval gazing, something for reclusive pipe-smoking armchair fissionados who like to sound smart but can't actually function in the real world. That opinion might be due in part to how Americans study philosophy, or, more accurately, how they don't. The United States has a public school curriculum that includes science, history, literature, and even foreign language, but for whatever reason, philosophy isn't in there, not as a class unto itself, unlike many other countries. If you combine that with the fact that certain classical philosophical questions, like is there free will, have been debated for millennia without any conclusive answer, per se, it's easy to see why somebody might get the impression that a book entitled Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals might just be something for the nerdiest of nerds. So you know the evolution of thought about the nature and purpose of government, or you know 15 theoretical foundations for ethics that don't work in practice. Who cares? What can you do with that? Well, you can't build a bridge with philosophy, not unless you have a really amazing library, but there are good arguments for studying it or even making it a mandatory course in American schools. First, philosophy is a fantastic way to learn how to think clearly. Intuition can be a great tool for figuring out the answers to certain kinds of problems, but it's not 100% reliable. Logic, on the other hand, the foundation for philosophy doesn't seem to be subject to differences in mood or lighting or mood lighting. Logic allows us to see how things really work as opposed to how we feel they work. Philosophers have been using logic to carefully arrange their own thoughts and to tear apart the crappy thinking of others for thousands of years. Reading and understanding that work makes certain weak and strong arguments familiar, sort of like a quick draw holster of rational analysis, which is a really, really useful skill if you don't like being talked into stupid stuff. For example, I recently did a thunk episode covering Pascal's wager, a pretty terrible argument that's been kicking around for almost 2.5 millennia. And it's still used today by everyone from religious proselytizers to political activists to try and sell you their ideas, despite the fact that philosophers have been blasting it to pieces for centuries for being so bad. And the sad part is that people still buy into that reasoning because for them, it seems fresh and convincing. Having a background in philosophy gives you some familiarity with the structure of commonly used arguments, so you can recognize the badly constructed ones right off the bat and blow them out of the water without so much as opening Google. Second, philosophy allows you to align your will with your behavior. We've all seen people who don't recognize the implications of their actions, who don't realize that what they do doesn't really match what they believe. It's not just hypocritical to live that way, it's self-defeating. If you want to live in a world where people aren't on their phone all the time and you're on your phone all the time, you're never going to get what you want. And if you go to war with some nation because they don't believe in your religion that preaches peace, it's going to be a lot harder to convince them of that ideology afterwards. However, understanding all of the implications of those values means that you'll never be caught with your pants down, wishing that you had just a little more time to work out the details as they crop up in your life. Philosophers have identified catalog and even resolved many of those implications in many different ways, so you don't need to reinvent the wheel every time you have a tough decision to make. Even a little research into those important questions can make the decisions that revolve around them much easier. Finally, philosophy gives you the freedom to question everything that you take for granted and rewrite it if you don't like it. There are certain concepts that we were taught from a very young age that are as invisible and intimate to us as the air that we breathe. Concepts that we use to think and to make decisions. Like having a lot of money is good, or guys look better with big muscles, or everyone's working for the weekend. Maybe some of those make sense, or maybe they're just irrational phrases from the past that people have been repeating for a long time because nobody has stopped to question them. Maybe that thing that we've been working for for our entire lives, because we've been told it will make us happy, is really just an easy and unfulfilling answer to a very complex question. People who don't study philosophy and don't think critically about those invisible ideas have no choice but to accept them, and even if they turn out to be something that they don't really like, to live and die by them. But philosophy allows us to see the lens through which we view the world, and if we don't like what we see, to change it. Not many things give you the power to change your world just by thinking. That's really powerful. It's clearly not a universal solution to all problems, and it's clearly not essential for a successful or happy life. But is philosophy still worth knowing? Is it something that we should expect our kids to learn in school? Please leave a comment and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah blah subscribe blah share, and I'll see you next week.