...In Which I Pick a Fight with Walter Benjamin

Science is good for the contentions that can be proven or disproven through evidence. For everything else, there's philosophy. So philosophy cannot be proven or disproven. That's not a bug. It's not really a feature, either. It's just a reality.

So what can philosophy do? It can (1) present a coherent vision of the world, that, while neither provable nor disprovable, is compelling for its elegance, its parsimony, its unity, its beauty. (2) Not offer any clear answers, but provoke and disrupt our complacent assumptions by providing insightful questions. (3) crystallize and articulate our unspoken and unthought phenomenological intuitions if only for the purpose of clarifying them for ourselves so that we can then dispel them or dispose of them. (4) (5) (6) ... 100 things philosophy can do.

The problem comes in not so much when someone writes something that cannot be either proven nor disproven. Science has its validity, and philosophy has its own separate necessity as well. The problem comes when people get these two separate processes confused - when they attempt to do with philosophy what only science can do, and vice versa.

Sadly, even many of the most famous and beloved thinkers have blurred this line, which is irresponsible. Even the great Walter Benjamin, for instance, makes what amount to empirical claims, without even the slightest attempt to provide any evidence for them.

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