I would reformulate your question to highlight an aspect that is not covered in the excellent answer of a colleague. Namely, why philosophy is not as popular as one might expect, given, for example, the general existential crisis and so on.? After all, in theory, any philosophical book on this topic should be sold in millions of copies, philosophers should be on the same level of popularity as rock stars, and so on.
First of all, philosophy is not for everyone. Huge masses of people will readily take advantage of the semi-finished product in the processing of figures of popular art or popular ideology, but they will not be able to independently crack and chew the raw philosophical product. They simply won't be able to — they don't have the appropriate intellectual resources.
Secondly, it hasn't pressed down enough yet. For now, you can be content with the presumptuous judgments of charlatans from “science”, faith in progressism, all kinds of psychology and” psychosophy”, self-made” cosmism ” and other similar surrogates. But the crisis is developing rapidly, and very soon all this will not help in any way, and everyone will clearly feel it. Another thing is that not every patient is ready to resort to a real medicine. However, there is still hope for an increase in the demand for philosophy.
It would be more interesting to know why you think that philosophy is not in demand? How can I measure this?
Look at this. In the 20th century, five philosophers became Nobel laureates: Aiken, Bergson, Russell, Camus, Sartre.
Crash Course Philosophy videos have millions of views on YouTube (by the way, the course also has Russian subtitles). The first lecture of the course entitled ” What is Philosophy?” it gets close to 5 million views.
Plato's The State ranks fifth among all books in all specialties in terms of the frequency of references in the literature lists of English-language training courses available on Open Syllabus. “Nicomachean ethics” on the 9th place and “Leviathan” on the 10th-also got into the top ten.
The No. 1 bestseller in the Philosophy category by Amazon – Ryan Holiday and Steven Hanselman's “Stoicism for Every Day” – was published in October 2016. In just over four years, it has sold approximately 1,000,000 copies, and the book has been translated into 30 languages, including Russian.
It is clear that we do not see people on every street corner reading, for example, the “Logical and Philosophical Treatise”. But we also don't often see people on the street reading, for example, classical university textbooks on physics or mathematics. This is complex literature and it is clear that its audience is relatively narrow.
I would reformulate your question to highlight an aspect that is not covered in the excellent answer of a colleague. Namely, why philosophy is not as popular as one might expect, given, for example, the general existential crisis and so on.? After all, in theory, any philosophical book on this topic should be sold in millions of copies, philosophers should be on the same level of popularity as rock stars, and so on.
First of all, philosophy is not for everyone. Huge masses of people will readily take advantage of the semi-finished product in the processing of figures of popular art or popular ideology, but they will not be able to independently crack and chew the raw philosophical product. They simply won't be able to — they don't have the appropriate intellectual resources.
Secondly, it hasn't pressed down enough yet. For now, you can be content with the presumptuous judgments of charlatans from “science”, faith in progressism, all kinds of psychology and” psychosophy”, self-made” cosmism ” and other similar surrogates. But the crisis is developing rapidly, and very soon all this will not help in any way, and everyone will clearly feel it. Another thing is that not every patient is ready to resort to a real medicine. However, there is still hope for an increase in the demand for philosophy.
It would be more interesting to know why you think that philosophy is not in demand? How can I measure this?
Look at this. In the 20th century, five philosophers became Nobel laureates: Aiken, Bergson, Russell, Camus, Sartre.
Crash Course Philosophy videos have millions of views on YouTube (by the way, the course also has Russian subtitles). The first lecture of the course entitled ” What is Philosophy?” it gets close to 5 million views.
Plato's The State ranks fifth among all books in all specialties in terms of the frequency of references in the literature lists of English-language training courses available on Open Syllabus. “Nicomachean ethics” on the 9th place and “Leviathan” on the 10th-also got into the top ten.
The No. 1 bestseller in the Philosophy category by Amazon – Ryan Holiday and Steven Hanselman's “Stoicism for Every Day” – was published in October 2016. In just over four years, it has sold approximately 1,000,000 copies, and the book has been translated into 30 languages, including Russian.
It is clear that we do not see people on every street corner reading, for example, the “Logical and Philosophical Treatise”. But we also don't often see people on the street reading, for example, classical university textbooks on physics or mathematics. This is complex literature and it is clear that its audience is relatively narrow.