Polishing philosophy depends on user experience

Some people may think that the previous discussion of "What is the use of philosophy" was written for philosophy students and does not seem to be of much help to ordinary people.

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

In fact, the reason why I suggest giving a personalized answer to "What is the use of philosophy?" is that I believe that philosophers should first explain their own experience clearly. In particular, the original intention of the name "Philosophy Unboxing Article" is to record, present and promote everyone's user experience of philosophy.

Only after collecting these experiences and summarizing, organizing and classifying them can we truly grasp what use philosophy can have, for whom it is useful, and under what circumstances it is useful in the current social culture.

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

I was a little surprised at first, I had never thought about it in this direction. Especially during the compilation process, I found that the "use" mentioned by the students was based on very clear situations and existing needs, such as being stronger in debate competitions, writing essays on similar topics more smoothly, and having more ideas when seeing similar issues. More, I am more talkative when talking about current affairs with my family and friends, and I am even more energetic when talking to people on the Internet...

This is their user experience, concrete, real and not abstract. So I decided that when facing students who are new to philosophy, telling them what philosophy is used for and what it can do from this perspective is truly powerful. Because this is essentially a philosophical unboxing article, just like when we don’t understand a new product, we will search for unboxing articles.

Then I will add how I personally, as a person from an academic background, view philosophy (or conversely: why philosophy attracts people like us), which can roughly reflect: what philosophy can bring you now, and what philosophy can hope to strengthen you in the future. Which personality traits.

Students need to elicit, organize and express ideas, and philosophy can have such functions; so if we want to make philosophy more useful and helpful to students, it is necessary to optimize the curriculum in this direction. In other words, "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 also some things that are not so "useful" but are somewhat enjoyable. For example, being able to talk about various viewpoints, questioning common boilerplate concepts, or clarifying brain-burning problems, etc., can also be regarded as the characteristics of philosophy.

In fact, this type of unboxing process can be repeated: collect experiences, make preliminary summaries, classify them according to different people or situations, optimize content and presentation methods, and then collect experiences again to start a positive cycle. I believe that as long as the sample size is larger and wider (after all, my attempt is limited to high school students), the answer to "What is the use of philosophy?" will be more exciting and rich.

Theoretically speaking, this is the integration of professional philosophy and daily needs. To put it metaphorically, we have to rely on user experience to continuously polish the philosophy itself. With this kind of thinking, we can eliminate the essentials and gradually strengthen the advantages of philosophy in application, thereby absorbing useful resources and creating 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. This is also the original intention of the "Philosophy Unboxing Article".