Why should we learn ‘Philosophy’?

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The other day, I read an article concerning ‘Philosophy’, and I was interested in a book named 'Introduction to Modern Thought' written by Chiba Masaya, a professor at Ritsumeikan Univiersity.
 

stand.fm

I'll share you some thoughts and summaries here. There has been a lot of arguments on social media recently. In a situation, people try to decide which one is right or not about the problems quickly. Therefore, such an environment will make them great stress.
 
To solve the problems above, the professor says, we need to think them more deeply, more calmly, and more abstractly, without being buried in the situation. The reason is that having a bird's-eye view is a basic attitude for philosophy.

An aspect of 'philosophy' is to explain logics of the things such as various things in the society as well as in human actions because of having axis of conflict, which you can see from 'structuralism', the French philosophy in the late 20 centuries. For example, we tend to think people are opposed in terms of being healthy or unhealthy, of being a male and female, being right wing or left wing, and so forth, and if you take one of them, you will need to think the other. You cannot take it 100% from one of them.
 
While such binary opposition will cause us conflicting views, there is a lot of obscure things in real world. For instance, if there are two types of cafes such as an old one and a cafe from an American popular chain, it's up to people who can choose which one. One reason is both of them have good points.
 
All we have to know is to think specifically as well as to receive obscure things. However, in recent years, many people feel they should decide one of them because of some pressures of society. It seems they tend to think they don't want to make a mistake on any problems; therefore, they try to decide one which is right of them in advance.
 
As you know, in fact, it is easy for us to support the opinion which everyone agrees with. Rather than that, having different ideas and opinions as well as saying different things than others matters because that is the basic of 'philosophy'. By the way, I came to think that famous French fashion designer, Coco Chanel used to say that 'In order to be irreplaceable one, must always be different.'

Thank you for joining me as always.

See you next time!

Teacher Asuka