¿Para qué sirve pensar?

En un curso en Internet se ha planteado la pregunta de para qué sirve la filosofía y si no será un frívolo entretenimiento elitista, sin más. Si le añadimos un «a veces» delante, desde luego se puede aseverar que la filosofía está en la categoría de «frívolo entretenimiento elitista», como casi cualquier ejercicio al que nos lleve la facultad de pensar, fuera de la solución de un problema cotidiano dado.

Copio la siguiente respuesta y así relleno un poco este blog galano. Os invito a opinar:

«In my opinion, you take very good questions out, XXX.
The thing is that, not only in Philosophy, but in any Social Science (in plaintly Science it exists too, but with a different appearance, since you need to have a good background to be a charlatan in Science before an informed public and stand more than one assault) you can find a lot of "thinkers" that are not actually interested in generate knowledge, but only in doing an exercise of imposing their own points of view and treat those who do not share this opinion with a kind of elitist condescendence. It is something which you (or we) have to deal with.
You have the same kind of sterile arguments in History, Sociology, and Economics... On the other hand you can find a lot of people who, independently of having a very own built vision of things, are open to discuss them with the aim to enriches the subject itself. In my opinion we have here on one hand a passionate expression of knowledge and on the other hand a more scientific one (more analytical, more concerned with the possible truth than with their own truth, etc.).
We should judge any discipline, I think, for its virtues before its defects, to have an accurate vision of what such discipline can give to us or to our society.

Well, leaving aside the things philosophy can and still do provide for acquiring scientific knowledge in the societies today, I always have though that any way of thinking and delving into anything (even if such thing is itself not a practical thing) teaches us to develop and use tools for us to be more analytical, more critical and, then, helps us to understand everything that happens around us, and being a bit less what certain people want us to be (noncritical mechanic workers and consumers) and a bit more free and human».

Y nada. Dadle a la música, al alcohol y al berolo. El resto viene rodado.

Pop_Subnormal_y_Punk_Intelectual.