"What Good Is Philosophy,
Anyway?
Jim Mazoué, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Philosophy & Religion
Educational Technologies
• Other disciplines ask ‘why’
• What’s so special about PWQs
(Philosophical ‘Why’ Questions)?
– What can we know?
– What sort of beings are we?
– Are we free?
– What sort of future ought we want to have?
– Do our lives have value?
Philosophy is an activity that invites us to
take a reflective stance toward our view of
the world:
• What we believe and why we believe it
• What we care about and why we care
about it
• What we can imagine as real possibilities
The Three Cs
PWQs are a means to constructing and
maintaining a comprehensive, coherent,
and correct world view.
Not just an understanding of what our wellbeing consists in, but how to live well . . .
How to construct a CCC world view that
enables us to live a creatively engaged
life of value.
What is a ‘World View’?
• A ‘constellation of frames’
Frame: a set of ideas that structure our
perception of, reasoning about, and
attitudes toward the world.
• Naturalistic vs supernatural
• ‘Strict Parent’ vs ‘Nurturing Parent’
• Individually oriented vs social solidarity
• What is the relation between having a
world view and living well?
• What are the consequences of adopting
the wrong or a flawed World View?
• Can you live well without explicitly
attending to the adequacy of your world
view?
• In principle: Yes
– We could be Eudaimonic automatons: beings
who always act in accordance with the right
WV without being aware of it
• Practically: No
– Given that our WVs are incomplete and
inadequate  the need for a reflective and
critical stance towards our WV
An implication:
People who don’t see the need for, or
value of, philosophy . . . are people who
think their WV is already comprehensive,
coherent, and complete.
So, how do you disabuse people of this
delusion?
You ask them PWQs. You puncture the
cocoon of self-satisfied security in their
World View.
Plato’s Cave and Solzenitzen’s Gulag
• Plato, “Allegory of the Cave,” Bk.II,
Republic
• Alexander Solzenitzen, “One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovitch”
• Inhabitants of the Cave and the Gulag are:
– Detached from reality
– Lack of functional autonomy
– Existentially disengaged
Being Imprisoned by one’s ‘reality’
Even the prisoners in the cave and
Shukhov had their world views
And
Like them we have a World View that
determines the parameters within which
we live our lives . . . whether we explicitly
attend to it or not.
Is your WV liberating . . . or a source of
imprisonment?
Being ‘framed’ by your frames
You don’t want to think of yourself as a
prisoner, pawn, puppet, or zombie
But. . .
Maybe you are!
Hence the need to attend to the adequacy
of your WV
‘Centripetal tendencies’
• Acquiescence to the Actual:
(“The only way I can imagine the world to be is
the way it is”)
• Adherence to a Culture of Capitulation:
Unthinking conformity to the status quo; limiting
one’s understanding of oneself and the world to
the way things are defined by institutional and
cultural orthodoxies
• Charles Sanders Peirce: ‘our justifications come
to an end when we are content to have them
end’
Beware!
How do prevailing institutional orthodoxies
(educational, political, social, economic,
religious) react to dissent?
Look at what happened to . . .
Socrates, Copernicus, Giordano Bruno,
Galileo
(and other ‘pariahs’ i.e., threats to
institutional orthodoxy)
World View: Meta-Framing
‘Tropistic frames’ influence our (largely
unconscious) adoption and adherence to a
world view.
• Frame: a conceptual structure we use to
organize and interpret our experience.
• Tropism: involuntary orientation by an
organism to a source of stimulation
(e.g., phototropism, thermotropism,
geotropism)
The Historical Record Shows . . .
Our susceptibility to Tropistic Framing
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds;
it will be seen that they go mad in herds,
while they only recover their senses slowly,
and one by one.”
(Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the
Madness of Crowds, Preface to Edition of 1852,
Charles MacKay.)
Some examples?
• Miscellany of delusions, madness, imitativeness,
excitement, recklessness:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
Witch Mania
Tulipomania
Alchemy
Modern Prophysies
Haunted Houses
Fortune Telling
The Crusades
Relics
To which we can add:
Our Destructive Tropisms
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Authoritarianism
Militarism
Lust for Domination
‘Resentful populism’ (Gary Kamiya)
American Exceptionalism
Consumerist/Consumptionist culture
Fetish of Entertainment, sports, celebrity
Destructive Tropisms will . . .
•
•
•
•
•
•
Commodify human interactions
Entertain
Distract
Anesthetize
Marginalize
Prevent us from living a fully self-aware, free,
and authentic life
• What is the purpose? To desensitize us to ‘life in
the gulag’?
To what extent do institutions in our
society promote and sustain
destructive tropisms?
And why?
Whose interests do these tropisms
serve?
Social pathologies
•
•
•
•
Thomas Moore, ‘cultural narcosis’
Carl Berstein, ‘idiot culture’
‘Crap culture’: Bedazzled by BS
Vicarious identification with consumeristcreated trivialities
• Institutionalized Inauthenticity
Is there a way out . . .
an antidote to these
social and existential
pathologies?
People grounded in a reflectively-held
world view & who lead authentic lives
dedicated to a thoughtful and critical world
view are . . .
difficult to control and manipulate.
Your world view. . .
• is the internal control system on which you
operate as an “Action Guidance System”
(AGS).
• at an operational level, it is a largely
unconscious set of embodied internal
states that predispose you to think and act
in certain ways.
• determines your functional orientation
toward the world.
World View as Operating System
• As a process of inquiry, the task of philosophy is
to provide insight into the adequacy of the
frames you use.
• So, to be ‘philosophical’ about how you operate
as an Action Guidance System is to have an
interest in how you are programmed to function
as an operating system.
• Philosophy helps to debug design defects in
your world view.
‘perspectival blindspots’
Clarifying your WV helps you to identify
unreflective and invisible gaps in your
world view – both cognitive and affective
How often do we think about. . .
• Whether we are living in a functioning
representative democracy?
• Strategic policy issues in government?
• Economic and social class differences?
• The U.S. health care system?
• Covert propaganda in the mainstream media?
• Our living in a corporatocracy?
• The ways in which your capacity to live an
authentic life is undermined by popular culture?
Unexamined life is not worth living
• Being a well-informed guardian of your interests.
• Having a comprehensive, coherent, and correct
world view.
• Living a life of creative engagement.
• Understanding ourselves, understanding our
world view, appreciating the fact that we have or
ought to have a perspective on our life and world:
one of the most neglected human endeavors
• The value of philosophy consists in recognizing
and rectifying this self-neglect
So, what do you think?
Can you live a good life without having a
reflectively adopted and critical world
view . . . a world view that is, or at least
aims to be, for the most part, correct,
comprehensive, and coherent?