Polishing philosophy depends on user experience

Some people may think that the previous talk about "what is the use of philosophy" was written for philosophy students, and it seems that it is of little help to ordinary people.

It may not help at this stage, but if enough people answer it, it probably will in the future.

In fact, the reason I suggest a personalized answer to "what's the use of philosophy?" is that philosophers should first explain their own experiences. In particular, the name "Philosophy Unboxing" is intended to record, present and promote everyone's user experience of philosophy.

After collecting these experiences, and after summarizing, sorting and classifying them, we can truly grasp what is the use of philosophy, for whom, and under what circumstances, in the current social culture.

This idea is directly related to my experience teaching in high school. I collected a lot of opinions through weekly questions, end-of-term questionnaires, and end-of-term group interviews. The final conclusion is that, at least for high school students, the purpose of philosophy (class) is to generate, organize and express ideas.

I was a little surprised at first, I never thought about it in this direction. Especially in the process of compiling, I found that the students' "use" is based on very clear situations and existing needs, such as stronger debate competitions, easier writing on similar topics, and more ideas when they see similar issues. , Talking about current affairs with family and friends is more talkative, and even choking people on the Internet is more powerful...

This is their user experience, concrete, real, not abstract. So I decided that for students who are new to philosophy, it is really powerful to tell them what philosophy is useful and what it can do from this perspective. Because this is essentially a philosophical unboxing article, just like we search for an unboxing article when we don't understand a new product.

Then I add how I personally, college-educated people think about philosophy (or the other way around: why philosophy attracts people like us), and it can roughly reflect: what philosophy can hope to bring you today, and what philosophy can hope to strengthen you in the future which personality traits.

Students need to generate, organize, and express ideas, and philosophy can do that; so if we want philosophy to be more useful and helpful to students, it is necessary to optimize the curriculum in this direction. That is to say, "what is the use of philosophy" is not necessarily a passive question, and we can more or less shape its answer.

Of course, there are some things that are not so "useful" but are somewhat pleasing, such as being able to talk about various viewpoints, questioning common boilerplate concepts, or clarifying brain-burning issues, etc., which are also characteristics of philosophy.

In fact, this kind of unboxing process is completely repeatable: collecting experiences, initializing them, categorizing them by different people or contexts, optimizing content and presentation, and then collecting experiences again, starting a positive cycle. I believe that as long as the sample size is larger and wider (after all, my experiment is limited to high school students), the answer to "what's the use of philosophy" will be more exciting and richer.

From a theoretical point of view, this is the running-in of professional philosophy and daily needs. For example, we have to rely on user experience to constantly polish the philosophy itself. With this kind of thinking, we can remove the rubbish and save the essence, gradually strengthen the advantages of philosophy in application, and then absorb beneficial resources and create a favorable environment. Of course, this is just an idea, there is still a lot of room for effort at this stage, and more people are needed to support it.

Under the general trend of education reform and knowledge customization, I believe this is worth trying and accumulating, which is also the original intention of "philosophy out of the box".

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