What Is Philosophy For?
Philosophy teaches you to see the stitching.
It’s not that the critiques are wrong. They’re mostly right. Philosophy can be tedious, evasive, institutionalized, oblivious to its own pretensions, allergic to evidence, and seductively fond of convoluted nothingness. It is sometimes little more than a career ladder disguised as metaphysical inquiry. It can reek of pipe smoke, and not in a charming way. But here’s the thing: you don’t get to dismiss philosophy just because it irritates you. Or because you once took an undergrad seminar where someone used “ontological” five times in one sentence. That’s not philosophy’s fault. That’s just someone being boring.
Philosophy isn’t about wisdom. It never was. The word was a lie from the start, or at least a marketing stunt—philo (love) and sophia (wisdom), as if thinkers were just gentle lovers of truth, sipping hemlock and asking difficult but innocent questions. In reality, philosophy emerged as a tool of social disruption. It was an annoyance, a heckler, a protest. Socrates didn't die because he was smart—he died because he was unbearable. That’s the origin story: philosophy as provocation.
And yet we’ve tamed it. We’ve given it departments, syllabi, conference badges. We made it wear pants. We taught it to cite Derrida without laughing.
But philosophy remains the only discipline that isn’t about something else. Physics studies matter. Psychology studies behavior. Political science studies systems of power, sort of. Philosophy? It studies the question of whether any of those things can be studied at all. It studies what “study” means. It asks who’s asking, and why, and who benefits from the question. It’s the snake that eats its own epistemological tail.
This is why philosophy refuses to die. Every time we try to bury it, it reappears—sometimes under a new name: theory, critical thinking, ethics, logic, foundations. It shows up in courtrooms and climate debates, in AI alignment and decolonial movements. It doesn’t solve problems; it excavates the frameworks that make problems legible.
That’s why philosophers are so annoying. They don’t give answers, because answers are easy. They ask how we came to think those were the questions. And sometimes they refuse to speak at all, because the grammar is already rigged.
Is it useful? Only if you define utility in a way that survives philosophical scrutiny. And good luck with that.
AI needs philosophy, not because it needs better answers, but because it doesn’t yet understand the questions. Political theory needs philosophy, because justice isn’t an engineering problem. Science needs philosophy, because empiricism without reflection breeds dogma. Even capitalism needs philosophy, if only to keep up appearances.
Philosophy is not a man with a beret contemplating the void. It’s a centuries-long attempt to reframe the void. And then question the frame. And then ask who installed the gallery walls.
No one “does” philosophy because it’s comfortable. You do it because you’re already in it. You’re already inside concepts you didn’t choose, asking questions in a language you didn’t invent, seeing the world through a structure someone else decided made sense.
Philosophy doesn’t get you out of that. But it shows you the seams. It teaches you to see the stitching. It whispers that all of this—identity, truth, value, objectivity, meaning—is historical, contingent, breakable. And it does this not to destroy meaning, but to free it. To make space for something else.
And yes, most philosophy is unreadable. And yes, sometimes it sounds like a joke with too many footnotes. But that’s the price of thinking in public.
So no, philosophy doesn’t build bridges. It asks who’s on the other side. It doesn’t cure cancer. It asks what counts as a cure. It doesn’t scale. It lingers. It resists resolution.
In the end, philosophy matters because every structure that wants to run your life—every bureaucracy, every algorithm, every discipline, every story about how things “just are”—needs to be questioned. Not fixed. Not updated. Questioned. Not with slogans. With thought.
And that’s what philosophy is for. Not answers. Not wisdom. Not even truth. Just the stubborn, impossible act of keeping the questions alive.