by little else

Economist John Maynard Keynes once wrote that "The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else".

Keynes might have exaggerated the importance of economists, but certainly not that of philosophers. If Keynes is right, and I believe he is damn right, philosophy is the most practical field of knowledge, much more important from a practical point of view than mathematics, physics, economics, even medical science.

People act on the basis of ideas. Without ideas there is no action, therefore, no life. Philosophy is concerned with the discussion of ideas, that is with the basis for action. Most ideas we hold and which enable us to act are inherited from the past and are so much ingrained in our culture that we do not even realize that we are acting on their basis. Needless to say, the greatest philosopher of our civilization, if we can call him so, the man who created most of the ideas which determine our daily behaviour is Jesus Christ. Second to him there are several other great names as well, such as Socrates, Aristoteles or Thomas Aquinas.

The point I want to stress in this post is that the conception of philosophy as a remote, highly theoretical field of knowledge, which has no relation to practical life and which is accessible only to professionally trained, sophisticated minds is exactly the opposite of what philosophy is all about. It was Kant who gave philosophy this reputation of an exoteric, largely irrelevant field of knowledge to be cultivated in exoteric philosophy departments of universities - and whose output people might consume as a symbol of intellectual sophistication, or as mere entertainment when they have nothing else to do.

Kant who sometimes is considered the greatest philospher of modernity actually killed philosophy and replaced it by the most dull and ridiculous of all fields of human inquiry - epistemology, which is concerned with the question: how do you know that you know?