[taylorscollon]

Not sure this is the strongest argument for philosophy. Philosophy is valuable when it is directed to the inquiry of truth for the sake of discovering truth, not for some immediately practical application. This sort of exercise pushes against the limits of thought, and that leads to interesting and important places.

This isn't just true in philosophy. In the early 20th century physicists announced they had solved almost all of the problems in physics. One thing they hadn't got around to yet was figuring out the position of electrons at a given time. But it was popular to regard this is a trivial problem. How they bonded was a more practical issue, and they had solved that one. But those who pushed on with this seemingly trivial problem discovered that it wasn't trivial at all.

Turning unknown unknowns into known unknowns is not necessarily practical, but it is certainly valuable.