Thank you. I'd also like to add that philosophy has a long history of pretty dramatic accomplishments in the real world. You can thank philosophy for science and the various modes of scientific inquiry, and the concept of natural rights and liberal democratic government. On the flip side, the Nazi regime was heavily influenced by late 19th Century philosophy (not all accomplishments are good?). Every discipline has an accompanying branch of philosophy that defines it's modes of inquiry and research methods, and philosophical lines of thought infiltrate every corner of the public discourse. It's just idiotic to say philosophers accomplish nothing in the real world.
>I'd also like to add that philosophy has a long history of pretty dramatic accomplishments in the real world. You can thank philosophy for science and the various modes of scientific inquiry, and the concept of natural rights and liberal democratic government. On the flip side, the Nazi regime was heavily influenced by late 19th Century philosophy (not all accomplishments are good?).
If your method of answering questions yields contradictory answers to the same question (eg: "Do individual humans have moral worth? Nazism says no, liberalism says yes -- philosophy!"), then it's not very good.
Philosophy isn't a method of answering questions, it's a discipline. (I mean, do you really think that everyone from Thales to Quine was using a single method?)
