May 2009 Archives

Back in late 2007, Paul Graham put up an essay titled “How to Do Philosophy”, in which Mr. Graham hoped to elucidate where Philosophy went wrong and why the field, as now practiced, must be renovated to remain useful. In fact, he goes so far as to suggest that much of philosophy has no benefit whatsoever:

The proof of how useless some of their answers turned out to be is how little effect they have. No one after reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics does anything differently as a result.

If I may, as a student of philosophy, I would like to offer my response to this argument, whose tenets have been repeated many times throughout Philosophy’s history.