2022年5月26日

Brian Wong EJ Insight

The case for philosophy

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The time for philosophy – is now. The past few decades have seen drastic shifts to what we construe as 'useful' or 'informative' degrees in higher education – and beyond. From the fixation upon computer sciences and programming in the late 1990s, to the surge in finance and business-related post-graduate and under-graduate courses made available thanks to the imbuing of corporate culture into higher education in the 2000s (and, no less, management consultancy!), to the revival of interest in the ecological and the sustainable in preemption of the existential challenges threatening to thwart everything and anything we know (all at once!) – there have been numerous cycles of subjects coming into, and fading out of popularity. It's year 2022, and I'd posit that the next cycle – or the next 'in-vogue' subject – constitutes the philosophical. And it's not hard to see why. The raging pandemic that has swept large swathes of Planet Earth over the past three years, paired with inexorable geopolitical risks and instability stemming from so-called 'great power politics', has compelled us to rethink questions that are of fundamental, ontological importance. Why are we here? Where do we go? Why do we live? For how much longer can we live? These questions may appear – deceptively – to be empirical postulations; yet undergirding them remains the nagging and emphatic sense of philosophisation, that has been sorely missing from a progressively de-intellectualised public discursive sphere. In short, people have questions, and people want answers. ...

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