The activity of philosophy is thoroughly useless. This, at any rate, is the view typically attributed to Aristotle. Philosophical contemplation or theôria, the ultimate end for human beings, consists in the active understanding of eternal and divine objects. Entirely disconnected from human affairs, it is an activity we can engage in only during times of leisure, free from the demands of our material, embodied condition.
This conception of philosophy might strike us as an important corrective on familiar pressures to demonstrate that philosophy can be useful: that it can illuminate or clarify real world problems or, at the very least, land our students lucrative careers. Or, this conception of philosophy might strike us as hopelessly archaic, a reflection of the immense privilege historically enjoyed by the philosophers who have shaped the canon.
In a wide-ranging and provocative new book, Matthew D. Walker argues that, however we evaluate this conception...
