I keep trying to figure out what the appeal of philosophy is. This is important, because philosophy is extremely harmful, yet many otherwise relatively intelligent people mutilate themselves intellectually, sometimes even fatally, by indulging in it. I want to understand why they do this, so I can destroy it at the root.

Reflecting on the most recent Scott Alexander post, about what sounds like a truly terrible philosophy book by a slightly-famous philosopher with a fervent local cult, I have a new partial theory.

Maybe a philosophy class is, for many people, the first one in which the teacher says that there are no established answers. Every class up to that point was just telling you what you had to believe or do because it is established as correct. So there’s an exhilarating sense of freedom. “I am allowed, encouraged even, to have my own opinion!” And the teacher claims that philosophy gives you tools to “think for yourself.” How exciting! You are allowed to think, not just to fill in the blanks in the homework assignment!

And, you are allowed to think about anything you find interesting, including things not taught in school! School is boring! You are interested in other things, like how your mind works! You are allowed to think about that!

(I’ve no idea whether this theory is true, because I have never taken a philosophy class, so I’m flying blind, which might be why this whole thing is such a puzzle for me.)

The problem is that the teacher was lying. Philosophy doesn’t teach you to think for yourself. It is a collection of fixed thought-patterns that are badly wrong, that distort your thinking way out of shape. In fact, you think you are thinking, but you are just silently repeating to yourself a bunch of verbiage from the Ancient Greeks, who were (apparently) unimaginably stupid and ignorant.

And it is not true that philosophy is the study of anything that is not included in other intellectual disciplines. It has its own narrow collection of allowable topics. (“How minds work” is the main one. Have you considered the possibility that this question is nonsense?) Approximately zero percent of the things you might find interesting and want to think about in depth count as philosophy.

You can, if you are a philosophy graduate student, do “philosophy of X” for a wide range of Xs; but it only counts if what you say or write is almost entirely self-referential philosophy, with only a superficial reference to X. If you actually think and write about X in any serious way, your supervisor will look at you funny and wonder whether you have what it takes to be a philosophy graduate student, and—if they are kind—will suggest that you’d be better off to abandon your academic ambitions, and to write a Substack instead.

You actually are allowed to think and write about anything you like on Substack!