[quus]

> The reason might be that philosophy is actually practically mostly irrelevant. I have not seen one undisputed statement of philosophy. And so it can neither test its statements, nor let others see their validity.

This is the core confusion I think. I find philosophy very relevant for the way I reason and solve problems and evaluate arguments, and in this sense philosophy is powerfully practical. But it’s true that for any given claim, there is always the possibility of taking the opposite position. This lack of final, case-closed consensus doesn’t mean that philosophers individually haven’t converged on true beliefs or haven’t made progress. It’s just that unlike mathematical truths, we can write out the proofs of our arguments, but there’s always someone who disagrees about one of the starting assumptions. So then civilians who haven’t heard of people like Parfit think to themselves, wow 2k years and you can’t tell me anything about ethics or logic or epistemology — it’s like bro just read the literature

[kbrkbr]

I can't say "been there, done that", because I know little about how you came to the position you hold. And I've had my share of burying hypotheses I've held for long times, so chances are I'm wrong.

But I held similar views. What moved me away from these views was the experience that in science you have methods that will let you see with high probability when your thesis is wrong.

Philosophy does not have such methods. You cannot only take the opposite claim for almost anything, but in my experience that claim has actually been taken by another philosopher for almost any topic.

The current consensus is in my experience lead by the people with the loudest megaphone. It's not the best theory given the things that really happen.

No philosophy (in the sense of actual writings of a philosopher) was causally involved in bringing the first astronaut to the moon; in building the first pacemaker - I would argue in none of anything where you could say: if you can do this with it, its probably on to something. Its methods seem to work.

As said, I cannot judge your thinking in any way, but this led me to question that philosophy is not practically relevant to me. How can I even judge if it works? And if I can't, is this not blind trust? Like an imaginary screwdriver for imaginary screws.