<p>The great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was once sitting in a park having a philosophical discussion with a friend when his friend, quite animated, stood up and said loudly, “That <i>is</i> a tree! I <i>know</i> for a <i>fact</i> that that is a tree!”</p><p>An awkward pause ensued as the two men realized that passersby had stopped and were now staring at them. Wittgenstein, thinking quickly, turned to the people and said, “Do not worry, this fellow is not insane… we are merely doing philosophy.”</p><p>When most people think of philosophy, they likely imagine indecipherable books that stretch on for a thousand pages, saying and solving nothing. They envision stuffy old men in misbuttoned shirts, untied shoelaces with mismatched socks, shuffling about hallways of some archaic university, mumbling to themselves, completely unaware of the humanity around them.</p><p>As an undergraduate in university, when I told people that I was considering choosing philosophy as a major, they often looked at me with some mixture of horror and confusion, as though I had just told them I was considering shoving a stick of butter up my ass. One friend even went as far as to say, “Dude, why would you do that to yourself?”</p><p>Philosophy has been a favorite punching bag for centuries. The criticisms are worn and weathered: philosophy doesn’t actually <i>solve </i>anything; philosophers simply argue about arguing; science tells us all we need to know, therefore philosophy is no longer relevant, and so on.</p><p>These criticisms are hardly new. And they haven’t been limited to whinging college students or skeptical parents either. In fact, the critics have been many of the famous philosophers themselves. Albert Camus vehemently insisted that he was <i>not</i> a philosopher and would correct journalists if they referred to him as one. Schopenhauer considered most of the philosophers of his day—stalwarts such as Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling—to be navel-gazing hucksters and frauds. Karl Marx even went so far as to write, “Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.”<a href="https://markmanson.net/why-we-all-need-philosophy#footnote-1">1</a></p><p>Ouch…</p><p>But it was those intellectual titans of our age—Monty Python—who perhaps captured these criticisms best with their classic satirical bit, “Philosophy Football:”</p>