Essay talk:Why Philosophy Matters

my thoughts

I once had a passing interest for about 5 mins a few years ago. I have a big book by Bertrand Russell, the title of which eludes me but included 'history of', 'philosophy', and maybe 'western', maybe 'modern' - its not important, but know that I did not make past the introduction before realising it wasn't going to do for what I was looking for and that professor yaffle from bagpuss was more loosely inspired by russell than I'd hoped. on top of this authoritative foundation, I once read 'thus spake zarathustra' in under two hours when attempting to learn to speed, the contents of which I only know or understand from skimming the Wikipedia article. as my credentials are clearly impeccable I shall now begin my critique. firstly, you mention the breadth of philosophy is essential to understanding how the world works, and broadly it may well be true. but in any practical sense, the breadth of philosophy is vast. most of it is only relevant to a few directly related subjects, and even then just how relevant or how might it be applied is going to vary. its too vast a subject for one person to be expert in all it, particularly if it is to underpin someones understanding of a different subject and not the focus. I can see if one was a physicist, it may be beneficial to have some understanding of the philosophical fields it grew from. it might be useful to know a bit about logic and maths. but that usefulness is going to vary from definite practical application to your field to just an over view of where things stand but not particularly informative for your focus. mostly though the majority of philosophical knowledge will be irrelevant to you. a deep understanding of political philosophy is probably not going to aid in understanding quarks or black holes. for an essay titled 'why philosophy matters' it doesn't tell me why it matters, how much it matters, nor to who. we only have a super broad and vague statement about its essentialness to understanding how the world works, and the hypothetical with the renowned physicist whose sniffy response to a question of a philosophical nature would make you doubt his competence. if this were an actual incident being recounted, I would be suspicious as to why the question is not given and nor is the answer. that maybe it was a stupid question, or was somehow controversial, or just not relevant to the specific subject. but it didn't happen, this was a hypothetical of your own creation to make a point but don't give any of the detail needed to make it.

the rest, the exam question and its unpicking seems be about something else entirely and lacking some essential details like the focus of the of course, what was expected to have been learnt by the time you would be asked it that would tell you its relative worth as an exam question, but why that was important was lost on me. AMassiveGay (talk) 00:43, 28 December 2019 (UTC)