the power of philosophy

Who says that philosophy is of no practical consequence?

Indeed, it is one of the many ironies of the history of philosophy that Aristotle, who was himself so naturalistic in spirit, and whose teleology was motivated throughout by strictly scientific considerations, should have set back the flowering of the scientific method and its fruit of modern invention by some seventeen hundred years. It is certainly arguable that had the mechanical theory of Democritus and the habit of explaining events by their antecedents rather than by their consequences prevailed, and had the nascent application of that method by Archimedes to the investigation and control of natural processes not been discarded in favor of Aristotelian teleology, all the triumphs of applied science that exist to-day might have been won for the race as early as the first or second century A.D. Conceivably, Pontius Pilate might have flown to Rome to ask for precise instructions, and the news of the Crucifixion might have been flashed by radio to the ends of the world and have been read next morning in the papers by the ancestors of the Mayas in Yucatan (B.A.G. Fuller, ‘Meditation upon Teleology’, The Journal of Philosophy 31 (1934): 513-14).

If Aristotle can cause so much harm by a bit of philosophizing, then perhaps some other philosophers might do similar amounts of good by their philosophizing? Of course, Fuller may be a tad excessively confident in his pronouncements …

Sydney