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1/ I've been tweeting about philosophy quite a lot recently. Here are some reasons why I think it should be taught as a mainstream academic discipline in schools...
2/ Humanity is kind of in a rough place, the boat of civilization is rocking. The problems we face aren't technical issues that scientists can engineer our way out of, they are problems of values, ethics and organization. These are in the end, philosophical questions.
3/ Philosophy is intellectual humility writ-large. In a world where people seem incapable of recognizing that people who think differently to their group aren't a literal manifestation of the devil, it's quite useful to think about how little we can and do know about stuff.
4/ Less surety in moral judgements, obtained through recognizing just how limited our knowledge and intelligence is, should help us negotiate and choose the right problems to try and fix.
5/ You can't *measure* the value of philosophy outside of philosophy (a philosophy test). Learning philosophy should make you good at philosophizing, and that's good enough for me.
6/ But even though it is hard to measure the value of philosophy, it's outputs are writ-large throughout our culture. Democracy, logic, syllogism, ethics. It's just good to know what smart people throughout history have said about these things.
7/ So maybe that's the frustration with P4C, it hasn't actually taught philosophy, it's just gotten kids to ask lots of philosophical-sounding questions. Philosophy has methods, ideas and history just like any other subject does.
