Who said philosophy was worthless?

Former 13-year old conservative firebrand Jonathan Krohn has had a change of mind, chalks it up to philosophy.  Here's his explanation:

Krohn is bucking the received wisdom that people become more conservative as they get older, a shift he attributes partly to philosophy.

“I started reflecting on a lot of what I wrote, just thinking about what I had said and what I had done and started reading a lot of other stuff, and not just political stuff,” Krohn said. “I started getting into philosophy — Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Kant and lots of other German philosophers. And then into present philosophers — Saul Kripke, David Chalmers. It was really reading philosophy that didn’t have anything to do with politics that gave me a breather and made me realize that a lot of what I said was ideological blather that really wasn’t meaningful. It wasn’t me thinking. It was just me saying things I had heard so long from people I thought were interesting and just came to believe for some reason, without really understanding it. I understood it enough to talk about it but not really enough to have a conversation about it.”

My favorite line: "enough to talk about it but not really enough to have a conversation about it." 

Via Leiter.

Some discussion of this and the Texas GOP's crusade against critical thinking here.

4 thoughts on “Who said philosophy was worthless?”

  1. Excuse my possible impoliteness, and if take as such my apologies, but so what? Better yet, so effen what that a former 13 year-old, now 17 year-old swung from conservative to liberal? Are you both suggesting a "conservative" can't have a "meaningful" conversation free of political ideology? If so, I call BS. Total BS.
    Sounds to me llike pretty standard stuff. This switching back and forth. I know I've fluctuated over the years. Always willing to hear "the other side."
    Both liberal and conservative pundits are good at inducing vomit if you ask me.

  2. Oh. Thanks for this blog. There aren't enough sites out there dedicated to critical thinking.

  3. I have to remind myself this is not an opinion blog!
    Thank you.

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