IP

The proper task of philosophy, even more important today, perhaps, than ever before, is to keep alive rational – that is, imaginative and critical – thinking about our most urgent and fundamental problems of thought and life. It is, above all, to keep alive such thinking about our most fundamental problem of all, which can be put like this: how can our human world, the world as it appears to us, the world we live in and see, touch, hear and smell, the world of living things, people, consciousness, free will, meaning and value – how can all of this exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical Universe?

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As a result of getting progress-achieving methods generalised from those of science, into social life, we can begin to achieve real social progress towards a civilised world akin, to some extent, to the intellectual progress achieved by science. There would be some hope that we can begin to solve the grave global problems that threaten our future: climate change, destruction of the natural world, population growth, the menace of nuclear weapons, and the rest. So vital is this task of tackling our problems exploiting aim-oriented rationality that we urgently need all the resources of universities to help us learn how to do it. Academia needs to be transformed so that its basic task becomes to help humanity resolve those conflicts and problems of living that need to be solved if we are to make progress towards a genuinely civilised world.

Nicholas Maxwell in 'bring-back-science-and-philosophy-as-natural-philosophy'