The Importance of Public Philosophy

Public philosophy in the academic world is viewed in a very contrasting way. Some academic philosophers believe that public philosophy is good as a whole and can have some benefits while others believe that public philosophy is useless and not needed. I'm in favor of public philosophy for a few reasons being that it can increase the publics' overall critical thinking skills, makes the discipline more accessible to more people, and can potentially help philosophical progress.

To start I should explain what public philosophy is which is the doing of philosophy in a non-academic setting with an audience consisting of general folk. With this general audience, they would have to have some interest in philosophy to consume this type of content in our content-heavy world. But in the discussion of the actual importance of public philosophy, we need more public philosophy now more than ever especially with this war on philosophy and the humanities going on now.

This leads me to my first main point which is if public philosophy becomes more prevalent and is consumed by a decent amount of the general public then it could help improve the overall publics' critical thinking skills. This argument is rooted in the idea that philosophy helps improve our critical thinking skills through logic, rationality, and the dissection of arguments. Having the public engage in philosophy should then help improve their critical thinking skills because they are being engaged in the things that improve academic philosophers' critical thinking skills just, they are being introduced to it through a unique style via a public forum.

Introducing philosophy through a different spectrum than the usual way people are introduced to it via academia could then merit that we have the potential of assisting philosophical progress through the engagement of public philosophy. As a result of this public engagement in philosophy, we could potentially find an idea or an objection to some theory that we wouldn't have seen without this public engagement because the more people are involved in debate the more ideas flow and the closer to the truth we can get. This is where the saying many minds are better than one can come into play because the more people, we have working on an issue the better results we should get. And to ignore the fact that someone out there can potentially have an idea that can assist your theory or even prove it wrong is egotistical and is not needed in philosophy since we are here to love wisdom and to be endlessly curious in our pursuit of wisdom and truth.

With philosophy being a discipline that doesn’t seem to be engaged with as much as I believe it should be mainly because the discipline isn't usually engaged within the public or even in education until a higher-level education is started. This is upsetting since philosophy as a discipline can help us develop and help personal self-development. With philosophy being an extremely important discipline that can do tons of good it’s a shame it isn't more readily available to people. But a straightforward way to make it more accessible and available would be to have people who are familiar with philosophy like academic philosophers to start engaging the public in public philosophy which would then make this discipline more accessible to more people and in turn, could do more good.

As always stay curious!