Ask HN: Learning about philosophy

There are plenty of philosophers (and non-philosophers) who've thought they did in fact answer such questions, so they would not agree with you that these questions have been intractable.

What philosophy lacks is the broad consensus that science has, there's also arguably no way to "objectively" tell who is right in philosophy, as what that even means or what standards we use is itself open to debate.

"it can offer you no sure answers and no means of mediating between potential answers"

If you agree with someone about the ground rules and assumptions, then you can judge and by some such standards there have been "objectively" provable answers and "progress".

But is philosophy's function to find answers?

Many would say that it's actually more about helping you to find questions.

I've heard that in science finding the right questions is often the harder and more important thing than finding the answers, which are often a pretty straightforward process after you know the questions to ask.

If philosophy can help to ask the right questions, then it can be useful even if it doesn't help you find answers that will convince everyone no matter what assumptions they have or are willing to grant.

People involved in the sciences (and believers in scientific ideals) often pride themselves as being open to questioning everything, and greatly value such openness.

First, this itself is a philosophical position, so if such a position is useful to science then philosophy is useful to science.

Second, while such openness is often claimed as an ideal, in practice it's common for people involved in the sciences (and their fans) not to be so open after all. Philosophical training can help them to be more questioning and see their own assumptions where they might be blind to them otherwise. So this too makes philosophy useful to science (or at least the ideals of science that so many aspire to).

Next, philosophy, like math, is useful for training the mind. You can become a more rigorous thinker by studying philosophy -- this I believe is one reason that people with a philosophy degree are the ones most commonly admitted to law school.

Philosophy could also expand your mind or your horizons, and let you see things from another perspective that you otherwise might have been blind to. That's been one of its most valuable uses for me.

For this purpose, I recommend some of the following:

- Max Stirner. Sort of a proto-anarchist that critiqued everything and denied the authority of everyone.

- Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morality. The concepts in this book will radically shake up your understanding of modern ethics and values.

- A work about Zen Buddhism. Zen in particular is very focused on the everyday moment, in a way distinctly opposite from the common YOLO / carpe diem idea we’re all familiar with.

- Spinoza. HN’s especially will appreciate the complex, mathematical nature of his metaphysics.

Take a look at the enormous popularity of Stoicism on HN. I think quite a few people here would disagree with you about philosophy being "utterly incapable of telling us what to make or do".

I would agree that Plato/Aristotle are good foundations for understanding European intellectual history but a lot of chronological study is required to see their influence / relevance today. Here's a cool dependency graph that shows the centrality of Ancient thought: http://www.designandanalytics.com/philosophers-gephi/

However, I worry that a student without some grasp of valid inference would be at the mercy of aesthetic attraction/repulsion factors for deciding what to accept as valid.

I specifically recommended "Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking" because I found it to be the most practical and skill-based class in a Philosophy curriculum. While they usually cover some proofs, most of the content has to do with identifying arguments. In addition, having knowledge of formal/informal fallacies helps in everyday inference. It is also relatively free of heavy "Greco-roman" western bias, which may appeal to a wider audience.