How can philosophical thinking influence man today ??

Answer 1

Philosophy is a quest for understanding. It is not necessarily a quest for "absolutes" of any sort, although most philosophers do seek certainty to some degree. Philosophy influences us whether we consciously realize it or not. When we suffer, or confront great personal challenges, we often ask WHY types of questions. Why is this happening to me? What did I do to deserve this? I there some purpose to this suffering, or is it just totally random? Our answers affect how we deal with everything because they affect how we feel about ourselves and about the world. What is missing for many people is consciousness of this questioning process. Too many people simply accept what they've learned from family, culture, etc., without consciously and openly questioning such things. Active philosophy is an attempt to engage our lives consciously. Some philosophies say you should learn to live LESS consciously (be more spontaneous and intuitive), but if you don't at least go through a phase of conscious philosophical thinking, you are not really CHOOSING to live spontaneously, instead, you are simply forfeiting your individuality and following whatever crowd you are hanging around in. Philosophy can, and should, influence human life by increasing our level of awareness, and thus increasing our capacity for authentic individuality.

Answer 2

Bring in a new era of a conscientious government.
Influence people of power to be more philanthropic.
Divert issues from that of the ego to that of morality.

Answer 3

help men understand the issues in life; guides his thoughts, actions, and words; and directs his present and future

Answer 4

___A lot of people today talk about questioning assumptions, and for decades, there have been a lot of people calling themselves "radicals". The word "radical" is related to "radish", and has the sense of dealing with the roots of ideas. Much of so-called "radicalism" on the political scene has concerned superficial, material (economic) and social rearrangements that would be very disturbing to those deprived under the new arrangements, while omitting the questioning and revising of assumptions that lie concealed under layers of our practical truths. I can't think of a current word for the former, but I'll call it "profound", despite its being used as a synonym for "deep". "Profound" has a root (like "foundation") that at least suggests the impenetrability and opacity of firm ground, (critical to thought, but not deep) while "deep" is all about the penetration of surface observations. A baseball bat to the side of the head, then, is a profound experience, but not a deep one, and the questioning of whether the things of the world are absolutely distinct and plural, or connected to one another, and hence partake of some existential dependency, is a deep question, which affects other questions about how we know what we know, and if causation is a true phenomenon.
___Much of modern thought, even in philosophy, focusses on "profound" but not "deep" concerns, and this shows up especially in the relative valuation of the two domains. Marxian thought is the epitome of profound and superficial, and, in its presuppositions of subjectivism, so is so-called "post"-modernism. (In cutting off the subject from the world, the world is cast as opaque to our experience, as impenetrable, and the subject, as disconnected from it.) Much of feminist theory, with its historical emphasis on finding truth in emotions and on power and economic gain, is also profound and superficial.
___Along with the talk of radicalism and assumption-questioning, there have been many fads and movements over the past century that are concerned with apocalyptic themes and new ages. But historically (in the West), new ages have arrived accompanied by or because of some sort of relatively radical adjustments to the prevailing cultural assumptions of the prior age. (I follow Thos. Kuhn in this, despite his forbidding it.)
___And prior to such times of change, such apocalyptic talk crops up in history, as if members of a culture sense when it's time for a change, and begin wishing for one. This has occurred over the past century.
___As Kuhn pointed out, there's an "incommensurability" between the new worldview and the old. One couldn't extrapolate the prevailing presuppositions that would emerge thematically in the Renaissance, and more explicitly in the Enlightenment, from those of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. So extrapolations from the prevailing assumptions of today, i.e. from today's conventional wisdom, are not going to yield useful knowledge about what can serve as an authentically radical revision.
___So the question of what is conventional wisdom is becomes important. Begin with the consensus of the educated, what's taught in schools, and what's generally accepted among the "idea people" of the culture, the writers and so forth. Polls help here, and the majority of these people consider themselves liberal, or at least not conservative. Another approach, to bolster this observation, is to look at the intellectual trends that have been ascendent throughout modernity, and these roughly correspond with the demographic results. And here, nearing the end of an era, what of these trends can be plausibly be seen as having gone "too far"? Which of them have begun to yield absurdities? Again, the results converge, if one looks at the views of the loony left fringe.
___If the left holds down conventional wisdom, then what is the place of the right? Part of it is populated by foot-dragging moderns, who emphasize economics, but applied according to older principles. Part of it is holds on to ancient principles and assumptions, but these have been so battered in modernity that they bear little resemblance to their original forms. And as with the lower intellectual echelons of the left, there's a vast reservoir of common ignorance on both sides. The right doesn't have an intellectually coherent basis, but only an ad hoc assemblage of historical elements unified by some resistance tro conventional wisdom.
___One might consider here how difficult it is for conventional wisdom to see itself as such. Imagine asking a medieval Thomist and a medieval Platonist to see how their apparently fundamental differences were, in a larger picture, internecine. It's like asking Donald Rumsfeld and Dennis Kucinich to see their differences as relatively trivial.
___Politics provides an accessible level at which to measure convention, but it leaves the assumptions themselves unmeasured. Who's going to do polls on people's metaphysical assumptions? As assumptions, they're not made explicit in normal practical thought and speech, so they're unexamined and unknown to many of those who hold them. Philosophical thought digs into these assumptions, or ought to. A philosopher friend of mine passed on the following perspective: Western philosophy of the past 1-1/2 to 2 centuries is mostly anti-philosophy, or philosophy denying the validity of its own traditions. This isn't entirely fair, but some attention needs to be paid top what philosophy is.
___Conventional wisdom can't be dismissed as useless. It wouldn't have become conventional if its approach to reality hadn't promised, and yielded, some serious fruit. And some of late-modernity's problems have stemmed from beating the dead horse of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, thereby denying itself of the benefits that lie in earlier traditions. "Post"-modernism is mostly pure modernism, after the moderating effects of tradition have been squeegeed out of it. Conventional wisdom gave us civil rights and modern democracy, and even if some extremists seem to want to make any behavior that isn't proscribable into a right, the general principle is good up to a point. And even if some ranting atheists manifest a rabid intolerance of religion, and bring to bear on it scientific observations that have no relevance to the issue, modern skepticism has shorn off many of the excrescences of older religious traditions. And then, of course, there's modern science that amazing truth-factory that so dazzzles us that we try to exploit it for answers out of its domain, but which is bulletproof within its domain (excluding, of course, the "social sciences"). All in all, one must be careful not to toss the baby with the bathwater, and when one has to thrash around violently in the domain of ideas to hammer away at assumptions, this can get hard to keep in mind.
___So philosophical thought can suggest at least what the gist of a new, more fruitful worldview and set of assumptions will NOT look like. They will not resemble the presuppositions of liberalism (in today's form), Marxism, and feminism. They will not maintain today's emphasis on economics and other political materialisms. They will not focus on consumerism and sensual thrills, on political rights that have to do with primitive urges, or on emotions as the central locus of human mental experience. But these are relatively superficial considerations. The domain of the "physical" will likely require redefinition, and quantum physics already suggests this, but its overall metaphysical implications seem to have been confined in many quarters to a "gee-whiz" fascination with its paradoxes, and to misapplying it as justification for some vaguely "post"-modern perspectives.
___New assumptions will likely overturn subjectivism and skepticism, or rather locate them within a bigger picture where their status is reduced to elements, rather than the main events.
___This is not to say that Marxian thought and materialism and feminism have no value, in their more moderate forms. Some of their perspectives will be retained, but they will be more properly seen in the light of convention and tradition, and their claim to radicalism will evaporate.
___Disagree? I could be dead wrong. But it's easy to throw potshots at the more superficial historical perspectives. Give some thought to the deeper question of what constitutes conventional wisdom, and which of its assumptions are the weakest. Go beyond that to the metaphysics behind it. It might be a good thing to think about what a new eramight look like, without relying on the mere extrapolations of most futurists.