But Philosophy doesn’t help anyone
A comic response for those days when a student/family member/critic of your life tells you philosophy is useless. (Thanks, Rachel McKinnon!)
6 thoughts on “But Philosophy doesn’t help anyone”
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Feminist Philosophers 
Love it!
Love that comic, but I think his best on philosophy was this one: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2673#comic
Am I naive if I think the answer to “philosophy cannot prevent poverty” is “yes it can”? Anyway, it is funny how much yesterdays comic (http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2673#comic) could be read in contrast to this one.
whoops, someone got there before me ^-^
See, whereas I reject the other one linked (#2673) because I am fond of the stereotype of philosophers as we who would rather be right than happy. :-)
I recognize that this is a joke and thus intentionally exaggerated, but I can’t help feeling that the comic strip is flawed. Somebody who opposes spending huge sums of public money on projects with no (apparent) practical value (LHC, space exploration programs, etc.) isn’t committed to the attitude that *everything* without immediate practical value should be chucked. It’s perfectly reasonable to weigh the costs of various programs against whatever intrinsic value they may have. (Fortunately, philosophy is pretty cheap.)
So if the point of the strip is to lambast the attitude of the character expressed on the left, I think the strip fails.