Do you think that philosophy is undervalued?

It most certainly is these days, as is any discipline, profession or advocation footed on logic or deductive reasoning.

Yes, I think so. At its core, philosophy is about analyzing and understanding arguments. Not arguments in the “your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries” sense (aka “argument as war”), but in the “reasons and evidence given to support a conclusion” sense (aka “argument as exchange”). And to do so, it uses intellectual tools such as logical analysis, conceptual clarification, and dialectical thinking.

Arguments are all around us all the time. Every time someone tries to convince us of something, they are presenting us with an argument. The quality of those arguments varies wildly, however, and philosophy is how we separate the good arguments from the bad. Whenever we evaluate an argument, we are doing—or at least attempting to do—philosophy (whether we realize it or not).

So while a lot of people focus only on the most abstruse questions of philosophy when assessing the discipline—all of which I think are worthwhile, even if they are not always valuable to the average person—the basic tools and skills that philosophy has to offer are of practical valuable to pretty much everyone. And while there may be other ways to master those skills and tools piecemeal, philosophy puts them all together in one place.

@SavoirFaire That is a good point. I too tend to think of the more abstract applications of philosophy (which interest me as well, to be sure) when I hear the term but there is a more practical use for it, especially when it comes to rhetoric and pragmatics. And given the plethora of bad arguments we have access to thanks to the internet, it might do us all well to hone our rhetorical skills and become adept at discerning the bad ones from the good ones.

When it comes to the characteristics these days defining desperation in America, nothing surpasses the horrific erosion in logic which now pervades every aspect of our national conversation.

@Demosthenes Exactly. Whenever I teach an introductory level course, I always tell my students that I don’t care if they forget everything about Descartes (or whoever) so long as they retain the skills that helped them understand and evaluate his arguments. After all, that’s what the students are really there to learn—especially the ones who will never take another philosophy class.