| "knowledge—real knowledge—is about the ability to reliably recreate some effect. ... Literature and philosophy are collections of "experiments" conducted and suppositions made by our predecessors about how to live good lives" Completely and strongly disagree with both of these. Even in the sciences, there are many who value gaining knowledge for knowledge's sake, for the joy of discovery, and for a better understanding of the world -- quite apart from its utilitarian value in "reliably recreating some effects". Now on to the humanities... just a couple of examples: Do you feel that you know your children, your siblings, your lover, or your parents? Is the point of that knowledge to recreate some effect? Or is that not "real knowledge"? Historians write about what happened, and would probably consider themselves to be imparting knowledge, but they are not necessarily after giving people the power to recreate some effect. Now on to your claim that literature and philosophy are about how to live good lives. This sounds like a view influenced by the ancient Greeks and Romans, and is about a couple of thousand years out of date. Both literature and philosophy have grown in many different directions since then (though even then this was hardly the only aim of literature or philosophy), and plenty of people who work in both fields don't concern themselves with the aim of how to live a good life. Plenty of literature in the last century, for instance, is about pointing out the futility of trying to live a good life, or the absurdity of life, about humans constantly and inevitably being frustrated in their striving to live any kind of life, about going mad, about going in circles, about failure. The Existentialists were some of the most well known of such authors, but there are thousands of others. Representatives of analytic philosophy have often sneered at the aims of ancient philosophy, such as trying to find what it means to live a good life, and have (in an echo of scholastic philosophy) instead often focused on endless technical minutia such as analyzing sentence structure or logical forms of argument. Some other forms of philosophy are more about pointing out underlying assumptions. Yet others point out problems with these assumptions, such as Hume's critique of causality. And others still, such as some phenomenologists or the cognitively-oriented analytics, are more interested in describing how perception works or what phenomena appear. Yet others are interested in what we can know, what reality is, or what science is, etc. Sure, some philosophers are still interested in how to live a good life, or what makes for a good life.. but that is a rather specialized and narrow concern of a relatively small number of philosophers, and there's a lot more to philosophy in general than that. Incidentally, Francis Bacon had a highly scientistic view, and believed that every field should be more like the hard sciences, and that science was the only legitimate or best way of understanding the world (a view you seem to be echoing). Many people in the humanities do not agree with this view. |