hilosophy,Wittgenstein said, ‘leaves everything as it is’.
It sounds like a complaint, but actually it was a recommendation. Philosophy at its best, Wittgenstein thought, resists the scientific impulse to treat the world as a theoretical construct. It is not a view shared in the main by contemporary philosophers.
What is philosophy supposed to do if not theorise? At the same time most philosophers are happy to leave everything as it is in a more prosaic sense: that is, by not really changing anything. Philosophers may talk about justice or rights, but they don’t often try to reshape the world according to their ideals. Maybe that’s for the best.
Philosophers have a tendency to slip from sense into seeming absurdity: a defence of abortion ends up defending infanticide; an argument for vegetarianism turns into a call for the extermination of wild carnivores.