There was a reason I decided, after my undergraduate studies in literature, to switch to philosophy. I found that a well-argued point, no matter how contentious the point itself, could get you points in a literature department. In philosophy, that was no longer quite as easy to do. My master's in philosophy was my only "real" education in the sense that, although everything else was important, only the MA forced me to consider my words very carefully.
"Philosophy" as a concept means many different things and it's used in such a diluted form that we need to define it a little more clearly if we want a serious debate about whether it matters or not — but as a preliminary move, just so that I can make it clear where I'm coming from, I would define philosophy as a method more than anything else. To do philosophy would mean using a method of critical reasoning that always calls itself back into question. I'm particularly interested in the work of Hegel because he managed (or convinced himself that he'd managed) to create a whole method based on complete presuppositionlessness. He started out by taking absolutely nothing for granted, and saw where that could take him. That, I think, is the core of what has become the philosophical discipline.

You ask if our ideas matter to us — well, yes, I would say that they do. But what do you mean by ideas? The way you have represented the world to yourself? The abstractions that help you to make sense of the flux of activity everywhere around you? These would be basic questions that require answering if you wanted to take the first difficult step towards questioning your own words. Another type of philosopher might ask you why "philosophical ideas" should "make the world a better place" — not because philosophy needs to indulge in nihilism, but because that in itself is a pretty big prejudice that should be analyzed.

Still another approach would be to adopt a kind of ironic interrogative tone and ask how, exactly, you managed to attain "the secret knowledge that the whole thing is tied together with these fantastic little threads of thought" and what would happen if you DID tug at the whole thing. Would your whole life collapse in fact? Is philosophy that powerful? I'd say that it is, but only when it's done with care.


I think this is a great topic.

I also read the Stanley Fish article, and have been thinking about it... It reminded me of another article of his: "Ideas and Theory: The Political Difference", in which Fish says that "[...] when you descend from the aerie heights of theory, you will take nothing with you that will be of the slightest help in resolving the real-world dilemmas that will still confront you". (Just note that his discussion here is limited to epistemology and the political sphere of action, whereas the "Does Philosophy Matter" article seems to generalize about all areas of philosophy and all areas of human activity.)

We usually act without thinking about what we're doing. For some actions that's okay. Do you think much about the philosophical meaning or reason behind drinking a glass of water? You could. You could think about people who don't have clean drinking water, and think about the philosophical meaning of deprivation. I'm sure there are some people who do. Most of us just drink our cup of water and move on. I think that a lot of the "larger" decisions we make are also pushed off to the "do-without-thought" area of our life. Sometimes that's because we don't have time to think a dilemma through. I think that any system of laws -- be it religious or civil, or even just social norms -- attempts to think the dilemmas through for you. So, instead of being faced with a case in which you could do A or B, and have to decide immediately what to do, you know the law that should such a case occur, the correct act is A. Doing A because it's the religious law or civil law requires at least a passive acceptance of the philosophy of the particular system of laws. 


Does philosophy matter? Yes -- when you're thinking about whether you want to follow a certain system of laws. No in your daily life, when you're just following whatever law system you've chosen or grown up into -- religious, civil, social norms, etc. The aerie heights of theory are not only fun and interesting, but essential to your formation of identity, and I can only hope that those heights will always be in my thoughts in some form.