See also philosophers.

Many folks will, when prompted (and sometimes when not), exhibit a great deal of hostility to philosophy and those who study it -- viewing it as a waste of time, a foppish pursuit of a bourgeois intelligensia, or an outright danger to freedom or traditional sensibilities.

Now, I know that not all of the writeups in this node are very serious, but nevertheless: I want to make a few things clear.

Everyone has opinions. However, not everyone can defend those opinions, and as a result, they can do nothing but rant. A set of well-defended and well-thought-out opinions is a philosophy.

These "opinions" that one must learn to defend are not necessarily "random ideas" -- they are the foundations of our sciences and our institutions. Everything that one does expresses a certain philosophy, from a corporate mission statement to the way you break up with someone. Everyone has different ideas about what is right, what is good, and what is true.

Every discipline, from physics to law, has a philosophical aspect which is hammered out by the professionals in those areas, for two uses. Firstly, the philosophical underpinnings of a discipline permit different writers to critique one another. If one writer challenges another's work, they make reference to their common principles. If they cannot immediately find common principles, they are likely to engage in some kind of debate which will, inevitably, be of philosophical form.

Secondly, it permits workers in different fields to understand one another and work together. For example, Marxism was, in large part, a conceptual tool that allowed 19th-century economists and 19th-century political scientists to speak with the same jargon to address some of their common problems.

According to the Western tradition, the formal study of philosophy at the university level focuses mainly on metaphysics (speculation about the ultimate nature of the universe and its operations), epistemology (theorisation about how knowledge "works"), philosophy of mind (how it "works"), logic (the mathematics of implication), ethics (the study of right and wrong), and esthetics (the study of beauty and how it "works").

Those who say that philosophy is detached from reality because it relies on logic rather than empirical evidence are quite off-base; empiricism is itself a philosophy; it is the epistemological theory which has formed the basis of our modern philosophy of science. The criticism itself is a logical equation which does not reference actual practices in philosophy. Furthermore and even more ironically, logical operations can only be demonstrated by reference to everyday thought practices -- thus making it, in a certain respect, empirical.

Objections based on the idea that philosophy is used only to make others look stupid or to make yourself look cool are merely decrying the study of rhetoric, which is far more central to law than to philosophy.