If philosophy can't "prove or disprove facts", then what's its use ? To be pleasant to read ? To provide endless empty rhetorical discourse on wether we have a soul or whatever other useless question ?
People often expect much from the philosophy. They hope for personal enhancement or a better understanding of the world.
But no facts. I've read quite a few philosophical texts, from Platon to Castoriadis, and I think there never was anything factual in them. It's almost orthogonal to what we call philosophy.
> If philosophy can't "prove or disprove facts",
A philosophical proof is not a scientific proof. You can't prove that an assertion by Kant is wrong, or that Heidegger made a mistake in a particular concept. There is no progress through confirmation, refutation or reproductibility.
> then what's its use ?
The notion of use is ill-defined. What's the use of painting? or novels? Of course, many answers are possible and there is no single truth. So that's in the field of philosophy.
> To be pleasant to read ?
Even if a text is not factual, it can bring new thoughts. Just like meeting someone can be just shallow chatting, or bring strong emotions, or mind-twisting revelation.
> To provide endless empty rhetorical discourse on wether we have a soul or whatever other useless question ?
A relative of mine is a profesional philosopher, and I remember the first of the texts he authored: it was a "philosophical proof" that racism was wrong because it was inconsistant. I do think the text is a "rhetorical discourse", but the question is not useless. Debating such themes can be quite useful, in a certain way. If the debate is formal, that's philosophy.
> If philosophy can't "prove or disprove facts", then what's its use ? To be pleasant to read ? To provide endless empty rhetorical discourse on wether we have a soul or whatever other useless question?
Philosophy is perhaps best characterized as a process for elliminating false certainty, to raise difficult questions.
Philsophy would identify your implicit assumptions that things need a purpose to exist, and ask why that is, and what is the nature of having a purpose, and interrogate you about the purpose of having a purpose.
This seems like a set of frivolous questions, but it's very to walk around with a bunch of assumptions you were told at some point and never really questioning them. Above all, philosophy is as toolset for identifing implicit ideas and dragging them out in the light for closer scrutiny.
However I think it is worth recognizing that what the modern scientific form of verification is pretty new (falsifiability requirements, data sets, hypothesis, experiments, and so on), and doesn't have a monopoly. It's just so commonly accepted nowadays that it feels that way. But there are other methods of verification that work well in philosophy: consistency, finding agreement from other reasonable people, clarity, etc.
I disagree that Philosophy should be some sort of objective tool to determine facts, typically I think of it as a way to explore new ideas, discuss insights into things which ~might~ have tangible outcomes. It's been a few years since i've heard it, but people were jumping to the theory of forms to interpret some of the modern ml stuff thats going around
In order to rely on words like “objective” and “facts”, you need the philosophical underpinnings that explore the assumptions, meanings, and implications of those words and what they refer to.
Philosophy isn’t a method for directly determining facts, but trying to determine what is factual is intrinsically linked to a philosophical foundation of ideas.
>Philosophy isn’t a method for directly determining facts, but trying to determine what is factual is intrinsically linked to a philosophical foundation of ideas.
Absolutely, although I would add that it seems to me that the majority of people don't distinguish the axioms that underpin our current understanding of the universe (e.g facts and objective "things") as being strictly an upstream philosophical decision leading to our downstream science from just science itself.
And of course somewhere along the line, maybe "make you think", causes someone to think of something new and it turns into a new science. And of course, once it spawns a new science, it will no longer be called 'philosophy'.
Ignorance of the eternal is constant in man.
Thus philosophy lives forever.