Philosophy prof Robert Pasnau relays (NYT) a well-worn story usually told at the expense of his colleagues that goes something like this: Charles II summons a group of philosophers to ask them why a dead fish weighs more than a live one. After offering their creative, speculative answers, the king tells the philosophers that there was no difference between the two – and why didn’t they just weigh the fish? Pasnau rejects the implied criticism of his field:
The essence of philosophy is abstract reasoning – not because the philosopher is too lazy to attempt a more hands-on approach, but because the subjects at issue do not readily submit to it.
If we could simply weigh the fish, we gladly would. In recent centuries, philosophers in fact have discovered how to weigh that allegorical fish, in various fields, and on each occasion a new discipline has been born: physics in the 17th century; chemistry in the 18th; biology in the 19th and psychology in the 20th. The scientists, short on history but flush with their government grants and Nobel Prizes, cast an eye back on what remains of philosophy and skeptically ask: Why don’t you stop wasting your time and just weigh that fish?
It’s a question philosophers ask themselves all the time, and sometimes they despair.
How Pasnau frames his own defense of his field’s relevance:
[M]uch of what gives philosophy its continuing fascination is its connection with the humanities. To weigh the fish is doubtless desirable, but there is just as much to be learned in understanding where that fish came from, and in telling stories about where it might go.
If even philosophy is dismissed as a waste of time for being insufficiently scientific, where does that leave those other modes of humanistic inquiry? Reading Plato or Chekhov may not stop the planet from warming or cure a disease – or help build more accurate missiles – and it may not point the way toward a new science of ethics or will. Yet what of it? Does such inquiry not have a value of its own? That is of course itself a philosophical question.
The Dish 