There comes a time in the life of a student of philosophy when they start thinking facts aren’t important. What starts off as a passion to stamp out falsehoods and replace them with truths, morphs into an acute uninterest, and eventually disdain towards facts. I have suffered from this mental disorder for a long time, but have recently gotten cured. So here I am, standing on the other side, healthier and wiser, and preparing to persuade you.

Philosophy is a study of certain kinds of general ideas that are abstracted from particular details. So we talk about morality as a general principle, instead of focusing on real-life, on-the-ground policies. Making correct assessments about policies requires one to know many facts about what’s going on, and acquiring those facts comes with messy procedures, dirty hacks, approximations, and uncertainties. You can’t write a syllogism and marvel at the knowledge that if the argument is sound, and if the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true. Real-life isn’t like that. It’s not clear what’s going on out in the world because everything is too complex. Too many different things happening all at once, and no good ways of cleanly parsing them out. To the degree that anything can be understood, the job is left to specialists in each field. Philosophers, on the other hand, stand quite far back, look at the final results, discard all the unnecessary details, and abstract ideas from them to talk about.

Instead of being curious about acquiring more facts, and consequently enriching their picture of a situation, the compulsion is to wash away any messiness so that only pristine abstractions remain. And upon those beautiful structures, they apply the tools of logic and reasoning smoothly. Sometimes principles are plucked out from the facts and clothed in fancy made-up fictional settings called Thought Experiments. The working of the fine machinery of philosophy can only be witnessed properly when the problems are diluted and transposed in this manner, to the point where all that is ever achieved are some intellectual stimulations for the participants. The problems will remain intact after all the discussions are finished; the real solutions and their implementations are left to the men and women without philosophy degrees, who’re on the ground putting their hands to use.

But even if you’re not interested in solving real pro...

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