Philosophy Now Forum

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how disconnected modern philosophy seems to be from lived experience.

We argue endlessly about language, logic, and abstract theories — but do those discussions really help us understand ourselves, others, or the world we live in every day?

It seems that philosophy has become more of an intellectual exercise than a genuine understanding. Perhaps the problem isn’t philosophy itself, but how it’s practiced — disconnected from real-life emotions, relationships, and perceptions.

So here’s my question to everyone:

Has philosophy become so academic and closed off that it no longer touches real life? Or do you think it still has the power to change the way we see and live?

I'd love to hear your personal experiences, dear ones—not just the theories, but the really important philosophical moments in your everyday lives.

olwendam wrote: ↑Fri Oct 10, 2025 9:37 am Lately, I’ve been thinking about how disconnected modern philosophy seems to be from lived experience.

We argue endlessly about language, logic, and abstract theories — but do those discussions really help us understand ourselves, others, or the world we live in every day?

It seems that philosophy has become more of an intellectual exercise than a genuine understanding. Perhaps the problem isn’t philosophy itself, but how it’s practiced — disconnected from real-life emotions, relationships, and perceptions.

So here’s my question to everyone:

Has philosophy become so academic and closed off that it no longer touches real life? Or do you think it still has the power to change the way we see and live?

I'd love to hear your personal experiences, dear ones—not just the theories, but the really important philosophical moments in your everyday lives.

Philosophy has went to one extreme, in recent years with abstraction, and now a correspond swing to integrating those abstractions with experience is necessary.

I remember an observation Wittgenstein made, while studying him in university. If memory serves that observation, or rather story, went like this:

There where mathematicians working in advanced trigonometry who made a made a mathematical discovery. They could find no rational correspondence to that discovery in the empirical world. Eventually as time passed it was found the discovery described the inherent bone structure of either birds or a certain type of bird (memory on my part is fuzzy). So Wittgenstein made the observation that no matter how abstract an observation is there is a corresponding empirical component to it.

So with that in mind:

Philosophy is fundamentally a pendulum...nothing abnormal has happened relative to recent years. This pendulum nature is how it transforms.

olwendam wrote: ↑Fri Oct 10, 2025 9:37 am Lately, I’ve been thinking about how disconnected modern philosophy seems to be from lived experience.

We argue endlessly about language, logic, and abstract theories — but do those discussions really help us understand ourselves, others, or the world we live in every day?

It seems that philosophy has become more of an intellectual exercise than a genuine understanding. Perhaps the problem isn’t philosophy itself, but how it’s practiced — disconnected from real-life emotions, relationships, and perceptions.

So here’s my question to everyone:

Has philosophy become so academic and closed off that it no longer touches real life? Or do you think it still has the power to change the way we see and live?

I'd love to hear your personal experiences, dear ones—not just the theories, but the really important philosophical moments in your everyday lives.

Philosophy has been bastardized by Academic Philosophy and worst WOKEISM in academia and many in this forum.

But that perversion should not obviate philosophy's true function as a critical human necessity and tool to facilitate progress and preservation of the species.

Humans are programmed with the sexual drive function to produce the next generation and preserve the species.
Humans are endowed with functional module for the intellect, higher thinking which are obvious.
There is the meta-function that drive humans to seek wisdom, which necessitate a term and it was and should be called 'philosophy' where its details are as in,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy

The sexual drive had been directed to perversion and deviance [rapes, sexual violence, etc.] but that would not replace the sexual drive its original function. There is no 'modern' sexual drive which was adapted and coded in the DNA million of years ago.
Same with philosophy; academic philosophy is a perversion but that original function of the inherent philosophical function -seeking wisdom- is always there; humanity must made the attempt to restore 'philosophy' to its original function.

We can give the functional 'seeking of wisdom' another name but what better than the term 'philo-sophy'??
Even if we can coin another name for the inherent drive for wisdom, it will soon be perverted and corrupted.
So we should stick to polished 'philosophy' its original shine and intended function.

philosophy is where you find it...

the trick is - sometimes it finds you...

-Imp

olwendam wrote: ↑Fri Oct 10, 2025 9:37 am Lately, I’ve been thinking about how disconnected modern philosophy seems to be from lived experience.

We argue endlessly about language, logic, and abstract theories — but do those discussions really help us understand ourselves, others, or the world we live in every day?

It seems that philosophy has become more of an intellectual exercise than a genuine understanding. Perhaps the problem isn’t philosophy itself, but how it’s practiced — disconnected from real-life emotions, relationships, and perceptions.

So here’s my question to everyone:

Has philosophy become so academic and closed off that it no longer touches real life? Or do you think it still has the power to change the way we see and live?

I'd love to hear your personal experiences, dear ones—not just the theories, but the really important philosophical moments in your everyday lives.

I don't disagree. I have had better luck by viewing philosophy through psychologicl and statistical lenses, thereby adding more practicality and less theory.

Impenitent wrote: ↑Tue Oct 14, 2025 5:14 am philosophy is where you find it...

the trick is - sometimes it finds you...

-Imp

Too true....

olwendam wrote: ↑Fri Oct 10, 2025 9:37 am Lately, I’ve been thinking about how disconnected modern philosophy seems to be from lived experience.

We argue endlessly about language, logic, and abstract theories — but do those discussions really help us understand ourselves, others, or the world we live in every day?

It seems that philosophy has become more of an intellectual exercise than a genuine understanding. Perhaps the problem isn’t philosophy itself, but how it’s practiced — disconnected from real-life emotions, relationships, and perceptions.

So here’s my question to everyone:

Has philosophy become so academic and closed off that it no longer touches real life? Or do you think it still has the power to change the way we see and live?

I'd love to hear your personal experiences, dear ones—not just the theories, but the really important philosophical moments in your everyday lives.

I agree with what you are pointing out.

It seems to me that philosophy is often the practice of arguing for the superiority of one platform/belief over another. I've not been very interested in static academic or religious philosophies because they seem too rigid and absolute -- whereas it has been my experience that awareness and possibility are capable of moving and flowing and expanding.

I would describe my philosophical tendencies as a fairly fluid method of noticing and understanding patterns and connections, and then applying those to daily life and experiences to see how they work, and what else they lead to. It seems to me that being philosophical is a way of being... rather than identifying with a particular platform. If identities are tied to platforms, human beings might go to any extreme to preserve that. Furthermore, disciplines can turn people into unthinking servants of that.

Living, breathing philosophy makes the most sense to me. It's like a collective (loose template) of what has been learned/discovered being thoughtfully merged with the particulars of any current circumstance, and from that process comes more philosophical possibilities.

To me,
The 'philosophy' word just references one's love-of-wisdom, or maybe more correctly how much love of becoming wiser one has.

Having a love-of-learning is how one becomes wiser.

If one really wants to keep learning, and keep becoming wiser, then all they essentially need to just is just become open, again, remain open always, be honest, and just always want to change for the better.

To become, and to remain, open just takes not having nor holding onto any beliefs and assumptions.

When you are Truly open you cannot not keep learning, and becoming wiser.

The first question that springs to mind is... when did philosophy ever have anything much to do with real life? Was it when they were having difficulty with the idea of things that change still being the same basic things?

And the other worrying question is... which of the people writing in this conversation has read any major work of philosophy that was published this century? If none of us has read Judith Butler - and in truth it sounds quite difficult and probably most of us couldn't usefully read them - are we in a position to say that philosophy has lost contact with something? Isn't it more the case that we have lost contact with philosophy and are nothing but a collection of armchairs with delusions of grandeur?

Who among us is qualified to weigh in on Martha Nussbaum? Not me, I learned her name today. She's about 100 years old so I should have searched further. So who the hell is Richard Pettigrew? I had no idea, I got the name from Reddit, somebody there thinks Richard is an important modern philosopher. one of the questions he addresses seems to be "How should we decide what to do when our choice might lead us to change who we are and what we value?" is that a question that is far removed real life?

olwendam wrote: ↑Fri Oct 10, 2025 9:37 am Lately, I’ve been thinking about how disconnected modern philosophy seems to be from lived experience.

We argue endlessly about language, logic, and abstract theories — but do those discussions really help us understand ourselves, others, or the world we live in every day?

It seems that philosophy has become more of an intellectual exercise than a genuine understanding. Perhaps the problem isn’t philosophy itself, but how it’s practiced — disconnected from real-life emotions, relationships, and perceptions.

So here’s my question to everyone:

Has philosophy become so academic and closed off that it no longer touches real life? Or do you think it still has the power to change the way we see and live?

I'd love to hear your personal experiences, dear ones—not just the theories, but the really important philosophical moments in your everyday lives.

For me personally, philosophy showed me the emptiness of all physical matter.

Philosophy changed everything to nothing. Talking about nothing with human language was like trying to hit a target that doesn’t exist.

It’s like trying to nail down the edge of the ocean to the beach, the idea simply didn’t hold water. Real life felt more like a seamless continuous ever changing flux of energetic movement that could not be captured by language, or mental understanding.
The experience was almost like my finger pointing to the moon.

The Enlightenment was pragmatic and not theoretical. Descartes moved philosophy from wisdom philo-sophia to the problem of knowledge epistemology. Certainty was not faith but systematic doubt. Descartes was not an epistemological skeptic. The Enlightenment freed the human race from inherited dogma. So, yes rationalism was used, but was not the Age of Reason of the seventeenth century.
Does it work? Yes, rationalism is a priori, and Empiricism is a posteriori.
British Empiricism of the eighteenth century of John Locke became modern science. Rationalism of Descartes was certainty. British Empiricism changed with evidence.
"The most fruitful investigations are not academic at all, but autobiographies, narratives, and novels that should influence the understanding" Professor of Literature Damrosh PhD of Harvard University. With the authentic self, your role will be a series of roles we learn to play.
Tabula Rasa of John Locke, so read, read, and investigate as much as you can. "Never accept any as true unless you know it to be true" the Buddha found in the Kalama Sutta. This is pragmatic, "The American philosophy" of Charles Sanders Peirce a scientific approach to concepts. William James is to be noted too.
Be a philosophical skeptic and be, "Those who are still investigating." The skeptics we cannot p-know that knowledge is possible, neither can we p-know that knowledge is not possible. That is what philosophy is about possibilities.

Re:

olwendam wrote: ↑Fri Oct 10, 2025 9:37 am 1. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how disconnected modern philosophy seems to be from lived experience.

2. We argue endlessly about language, logic, and abstract theories — but do those discussions really help us understand ourselves, others, or the world we live in every day?

3. It seems that philosophy has become more of an intellectual exercise than a genuine understanding. Perhaps the problem isn’t philosophy itself, but how it’s practiced — disconnected from real-life emotions, relationships, and perceptions.

4. So here’s my question to everyone:

Has philosophy become so academic and closed off that it no longer touches real life? Or do you think it still has the power to change the way we see and live?

5. I'd love to hear your personal experiences, dear ones—not just the theories, but the really important philosophical moments in your everyday lives.

First of all, thank you for asking interesting questions. I've enjoyed reading the responses.

Here's mine:
1. Who are you and why are you interested in the connection/disconnection between 'modern philosophy' and 'lived experience'? Is this part of academic, formal or informal research? Why choose the PN forum as your target audience?

2. Who is this 'We'? You and who else?

Professional or amateur philosophers? Academics v non-academics?

Specialisms would suggest academics within a university. Most adhere to a set curriculum with the aim of students passing exams. Lecturers may be given flexibility within this rule-oriented situation. Humans are involved, not Gods. It is real life.

Contemporary philosophy is widely accessible to all. It includes all the usual categories as listed in any forum. Aesthetics, ethics, environmental, political - just a few which engage with real life human concerns. In fact, all do.
Philosophy can't be separate from world issues.

The PN magazine and forum is an example, utilising the internet for both formal/informal discussions.
Compared to academia, are they more or less likely to: 'really help us understand ourselves, others, or the world we live in every day?'. It depends. The content and quality of engagement can be structured or free-flowing. Respectful sharing of knowledge and experiences (like here) can lead to understanding if there is a willingness to listen, be open and ask and answer questions carefully.

3. Philosophy can be an intellectual exercise leading to some kind of an understanding. What do you mean by 'genuine understanding'? What do you mean by 'philosophy'? How should it be practised? Is there only one way? It is a process of thinking - sparks can fly - how is it ever disconnected from 'real-life emotions' (real as compared to what?) or relationships or perceptions? No matter where you find it, philosophy connects. That is why it endures.

4. Even philosophy which appears 'closed off' in academia can 'touch real life' e.g. ethics in politics. Ancient Greek academic concepts of virtue can be examined to assess the moral progress or regress of humanity. What helps or harms, promotes or prevents growth and development. There is the possibility that the 'way we see and live' can be improved. Critical awareness of the problems/danger zones can be outlined in papers or articles. Live and Online. To be followed by action. Or not.

5. I'd like to hear yours first. And please, what's with the 'dear ones'?

BTW. I'm not expecting an answer from dear granny gamester polytrack 'olwendam', 'olwenboniface' anytime soon.