Abstract

In this paper, we offer a response to Matej Sušnik's article “Kome je uopće potrebna akademska filozofija?”, which argues that academic philosophy is not particularly useful to the public due to factors such as the abstract nature of philosophical content and the lack of consensus among philosophers. While Sušnik’s critique of academic philosophy is primarily directed at questioning (and subsequently denying) the potential public role that a philosopher might play, our argumentation is based primarily on recognizing the importance and value of those aspects of philosophy that Sušnik calls into question, and then on pointing to the positive contributions of philosophical theories to the development of knowledge and the enrichment of the understanding available to us as a society. Drawing on examples of influential theories from the domains of philosophy of language, epistemology, and philosophy of art, we seek to show that, despite the legitimacy of a large part of Sušnik’s critique, philosophy contributes significantly to understanding the complexity of human experience and offers new ways of approaching important social problems. By pointing to the complex evaluative and normative determinants and the contextuality of experience, philosophy offers answers to intellectual questions of public significance, which is why we believe that the non-philosophical community benefits greatly from philosophy even when the concrete contributions of philosophy are not always direct or clearly detectable.